LANGUAGE mediates thought. There will hardly be any disputing this point. So it is that one humorous attempt to bring the message of post-modernism across announces: "The breadth of your mind is the length of your tongue." But if we lay down this premise, then faith, too, must be mediated by language. And then, of course, one will find plenty of use for Wittgenstein's theory of "language-games," recognizing that religious language is a "language-game" with its own peculiarities and rules. So while the propositions "Jasper rose from bed at 7 this morning" and "Jesus rose from the dead after three days" appear to be grammatically similar, they belong to two completely different language-games and must, as such, be treated differently.
The Christian faith rests on historical events, and Christianity is what it is because there was a man from Nazareth, Jesus, who claimed to be and was acknowledged as the anointed of God, the Messiah, the Christ. It is also historical that at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders of his time, he was condemned to death on a cross by Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judaea. He was nailed to a cross. He died, and was buried. It is likewise historical that his disciples — and others after them, like Saul of Tarsus — claimed to have encountered him, just as it is historical that from a group of frightened apostles hiding behind closed doors, they sallied forth bravely into the world to proclaim his Resurrection, all but one of them suffering martyrdom. And it is likewise a historical fact that his tomb is empty! It is important that the historical be acknowledged and recognized so that it cannot be said that our faith rests on pure confabulation. Something happened in human history, something so dramatic that it caught the imagination — and the thought — of a considerable number of the world's population.
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