Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Religious Belief

Contemporary philosophers of religion delimiting their field
often distinguish between belief in and belief that, and then
focus on the latter as more pertinent to a philosophical
investigation of religious belief. The believer's relationship
to a proposition, and the relationship between that proposition
and reality is of primary concern. The epistemology
of religious belief has thus tended to be approached as a
species of justification theory; its task is to provide a satisfactory
account of our acceptance or rejection of various
religiously relevant propositions. It is against this background
that some of the more well-known discussions of
Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion have taken place.
Hence one much belabored question has been whether
standards for the justification of religious belief can only be
determined within the context of the language-game
played by the community of religious believers; another
has been whether religious beliefs are even the kind of
thing open to justification, for it may be that the language
in which they are framed is expressive rather than propositional.