While the resonances between classical Christian negative theology and the discourse of deconstruction have been explored for the last twenty years, there has been scant attention paid to the resonances between negative theology and the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To be sure, theologians have shown much interest in Wittgenstein, but that interest often links Wittgenstein’s conception of forms of life to religious practice. Such writings have sought to view Wittgenstein in terms of philosophy of religion. In this essay, I am not concerned with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, but am interested in the connections between his writings on language and the view of language held in negative theology, specifically in the writings of the Pseudo-Denys. In the same way that Mark C.Taylor, John D.Caputo et al. see similar strategies at work in negative theology and in Jacques Derrida (specifically, the connection between apophasis and differance), I see similar strategies at work in Wittgenstein and Denys. I will argue that there are important points of intersection between the two, especially on the issues of the limits of reference in language, the necessity of communal understandings for meaning, and the view of the self within a community of shared practices and shared language.

One word of explanation before I continue. In making Denys and Wittgenstein interlocutors, I am not saying they were interested in the same things. Denys was concerned about liturgy and how liturgy does or dries not praise God properly, and Wittgenstein was interested in how language works and how proper use of language frees us from philosophical problems.

As part of the broad project of reconceptualizing the world in theological as opposed to secular terms, some “radical orthodoxy” theologians have begun to address the issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and marriage. These include, most notably, Graham Ward, Eugene Rogers, and (perhaps better classified in the post-liberal “Yale School”) Miroslav Volf. These theologians, however, have made only limited (or poor) use of the extensive conceptual apparatus that has been built up over the last two decades by postmodern feminists and queer theorists. By using these tools in a Christian, orthodox manner in accord with the radical orthodoxy project, I will show that we are led to drastically different conclusions, to a sexual ethic that is no longer “sexual,” but rather refocuses on friendship and celibacy.

It is possible, as I know from recent experience, to spend three years studying theology in a secular university, and even with a majority of that time devoted to the New Testament barely touch on anything that might credibly be called ‘New Testament Theology’. The texts of the New Testament are studied in considerable detail, with careful attention paid to the theological positions of each individual writer—or at least, for the most part, of Mark, John and Paul—but with no attempt to create a synthesis, to trace theological themes that link disparate books, or to allow a reading that goes beyond narrow exegesis to inform the exercise of speculative systematic theology. There are honourable exceptions to this general trend: Gerd Theissen’s A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion attempts something in the way of a synthesis, but explicitly goes beyond the texts of the New Testament in a way that makes his programme more a historical study of early Christian theology than New Testament theology properly speaking. Arguably one has to look back to the likes of Barth and Bultmann for authentic New Testament theology, theology based on the scriptural texts themselves rather than on a historical reconstruction of the theological milieu that produced them, and addressing modem theological concerns.

This article proposes one route towards developing this sort of theology, beginning with the significance of Jesus’s name. Though the Holy Name was once an important Catholic devotion, it receives little attention today, either spiritual or scholarly: yet when properly explored through readings of, in particular, the Letter to the Hebrews and Matthew’s Gospel, the fact that Jesus’s name is identical to that of Joshua (in Greek lesous, in Hebrew Yeshua) proves to be far from trivial, opening the way to a theologically powerful and spiritually refreshing approach to Christology and ecclesiology.

There is a certain urgency about the ethical today. Amid reports of the misery and injustice that seem to accompany all our human undertakings, and with increasing demand that it prove itself useful to an expanding range of unprecedented crises, the ethical is found to occupy a crucial place in contemporary thought. It stands at the point of a change, as our desire for a better world seeks the transformation of the one in which we find ourselves, and so it is to become the means by which we may be carried over from one situation to another, by which we are to make a difference. The ethical is to save us, and so the urgency of our salvation comes to rest in a particular and intense way on the salvation of ethics itself, saved and preserved for our sake, so that we might also be rescued and kept in safety and brought into the fulness of life that is to be ours. The enormity of this expectation of the ethical has become a kind of running theme through all sorts of contemporary discourses, assuming in many cases a force that would compel agreement without question, and at times erupting in expressions of disgust or even censure at those who would defy this logic. What else are we to do or think?

There is a sense in which this ethical has become the last sounding of the thinking of being in the western tradition, taking on the now empty form of its hegemony, while that thinking of being itself is already known to be fraught with difficulty, and so pronouncing itself as the final grand narrative by which nonetheless our redemption is to be secured.