‘God is Love’ is a grammatical remark

How should we make sense of religious sentences? Face Value Theory holds that religious sentences are (more or less) what they look like: they represent matters of fact and express belief in those facts. In this view, ‘God is love’ and ‘God is real’ represent matters of fact about God and express beliefs in those facts. If that is an exhaustive account of the meaning of religious language, then it would imply that religion is primarily in the business of dealing with matters of fact. In this chapter, I argue that there is a domain of meaning at the heart of religion which is irreducible to matters of fact. I make this argument by adopting the Wittgensteinian view that religious objects possess a grammatical reality and that sentences like ‘God is love’ are grammatical remarks that tell us how to speak and think about that reality. I conclude that ‘God is love’ tells us that God and love share an internal grammatical relationship, and that love – not evidence – brings one to God.