Endnotes
1. Wittgenstein spent much of the rest of his career critiquing his own earlier work. This also parallels, at least in part, what is happening in the differences between the earliest gospel, Mark, and those gospels written after Mark but with Mark in mind.
2. For more on this, I commend the Wikipedia article on the
Tractatus,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus.
3. Donald Juel,
Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 54.
4. ibid, 59.
5. ibid, 61.
6. Of course my reading of Wittgenstein here departs from the "mainstream interpretation" of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The logical postivists and the Vienna school took Wittgenstein to be saying that not only are ethics and religion meaningless but also worthless and ruled out as viable human activities available for speech. I do not personally believe this was Wittgenstein's "intent."
7. It has intrigued Wittgenstein scholars now for generations that although Wittgenstein considered ethics part of the ineffable, metaphysical stuff that remains unspeakable, he himself strove to live a morally upright, even some might say ethically perfect life.
© March 2012
Journal of Lutheran Ethics
Volume 12, Issue 2