assertive moves explicit always invites scepticism about the claims
involved.^28
Philosophy and science are both confined to the impersonal mode of
utterance because both aspire to general and perspective-invariant
knowledge. This already implies that the word ‘I’ can play no essential
role in scientific or philosophical speech.^29 If the phrase ‘I am sure that’
occurs in a scientific text this usually signals that the author does not
intend to offer any proof or argument for the claim that follows.
Religious speech is different with respect to perspective. It is essen-
tially perspectival. That means that if one were to translate religious
speech into an impersonal mode of speech, it would not be religious
speech any more.^30 Expressions like ‘I firmly believe in’, ‘I am confi-
dent about’, ‘I hope for’ are essential elements of the religious language
game. Religious speech is irreducibly expressive and, therefore, irre-
ducibly personal or subjective.^31 Partaking in a religious language game
involves expressing one’s own attitude towards God, towards mankind,
towards the world or one’s own past or future.^32 This does not imply,
however, that religious speech is merelyexpressive, merelysubjective.
Uttering religious beliefs involves making genuine truth claims. This
holds even in cases where the content of my religious belief is not too
clear. For example, it may be the case that one needs the whole range of
theological knowledge and acumen of St. Thomas Aquinas in order to
understand what the doctrine of God’s trinity is all about.^33
Thus it seems as if the religious language game has some of the fea-
tures that both the scientific and the philosophical language game lack:
perspective and subjectivity. Religious speech is apt to articulate what
scientific speech cannot express: how it is to be a knower, a perceiver,
believer and actor, how it is to lead a human life. It thus makes explicit
the tacit subjectivity that lies at the bottom even of objective knowledge
claims. By employing the religious mode of speech, we bring ourselves
into our picture of the world. Of course man appears in scientific theo-
ries as well. But he appears there as the object of thought, not as the
thinker, not as the epistemic subject. It is quite different with religious
speech. Its topic is not manbut meor us.
Thus, the crisis of religion in modernity turns out to be a crisis of
human self-understanding.^34 Fortunately, by having lost some of the con-
tentsof religious speech we have not lost its forms. Perhaps we do not pray
any more, but we know psalms and poems. We do not study the Bible as
people used to do, but we are deeply moved by Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion. Religious forms of expression have become forms of art. They
are, so Schelling argues, ‘identical’. But art has not only inherited reli-64 Henning Tegtmeyer