The question of the meaning of religious language has occurred as one of the most pervasive challenges to contemporary philosophical-theological activity. It is not news that theologians have been particularly embattled since learning of the philosophical declaration that "God-talk" is nonsense or that "religious belief assertionexpressions" have a low credit rating, if any. This is a serious charge and a charge generally offering a new dimension of discussion in philosophy of religion -not as once, What is there? Does God exist? Is there immortality or ressurrection?, but IS the word "God" meaningful, WHAT is the meaning of the term "Death," IS talk about "life after death" intelligible? The charge that "God-talk" or "religious belief" utterance is nonsense is not itself an unambiguous one since there are various kinds of nonsense. Consider the following: "The state of California is about to crack away from the continent and drop into the ocean." This seems implausible (incredible, unconvincing). "No more and no less than 13 angels can dance on the head of a pin at one time." This seems irrelevant (uninteresting, trivial, pointless, of no consequence). "Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe" is unintelligible, or is it? "The earth has existed for five minutes." It is difficult to imagine serious conditions for saying this.
What I am suggesting by these examples, which are not exhaustive, are several matters: i. For all the "talk about God-talk" it is not clear what the challenges have been concerned with: implausibility, unintelligibility, pointless, not serious, or what? 2. Discussions of "religious language" have in general during the past decade or two contributed to the pollution problem by throwing up smoke screens concerning verifiability and falsifiability of religious claims, prescriptive schemes of language, truth, symbolic uses versus literal uses, cognitive/non-cognitive demarcations, and the nature of selfverifying language-games or self-contained universes of discourse. Philosophers have rushed in where angels fear to tread. In doing so,