The grammar of the sacred: Toward a Wittgensteinian sociology of religion

This dissertation presents a grammatical understanding of religious life in light of the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in order to spell out some critical implications for the sociology of religion. Wittgenstein's approach to understanding the meaning of human action based on rules and social contexts carries with it some important implications for our understanding of central issues regarding the character of social scientific explanations of religion. This dissertation aims at exploring such implications by discussing Wittgenstein's philosophical themes and his view on religion---'the expressibility of religion'---reflected in his view of language.;First, it discusses the concept of 'practice' as a key concept in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, impinging on his idea that human life begins in doing, not thinking, i.e., the priority of practice over theory in understanding human affairs. Second, it discusses Wittgenstein's view of 'religion as practice(s)' with the problem of meaning in understanding religion based on his notions of language-games and forms of life. In his account of religion, religious ideas or views and a way of life are inseparable for "where that practice and these views go together, the practice does not spring from the view, but both of them are there." It is argued that the elucidation of the character of religious belief can only be achieved by paying careful attention to the way in which religious language works in practice. The criteria for the intelligibility of religious belief cannot be found outside religion since they are given by religious discourse itself which is intimately tied to religious practice(s). Finally, it deals with the conceptual problems involved in employing the concept of the sacred in the sociology of religion, manifest in the Durkheimian Tradition (the sacred as society), in the phenomenological tradition (the sacred as a mode of subjective experience), and in the materialist tradition (the sacred as embodied). Refusing to search for any common essence in the concept of the sacred, the dissertation suggests that we treat it as a 'family resemblance concept,' and urges us to turn toward the workings of various concepts which religious believers use in their religious practices.