Within religious studies, there is a longstanding tradition of methodological agnosticism: the researcher deliberately brackets the objective truth or falsehood of the beliefs they are studying. They would say: ‘For the believers this is real, therefore we accept it as real, however different our own perspective may be.’ The laudable intention behind this approach is to take religion seriously without allowing the researcher's personal perspective to interfere. However, in my paper, I wish to highlight a risk implicit within this approach.

Individual or exclusive truth claims do not belong in religious studies. It is not for the researcher to judge whether God exists or prayer works. By bracketing such questions and accepting beforehand that, for the believer, God exists or prayer works, an important aspect of religion is left out of the investigation: there are many different ways in which something can be real for someone. If the researcher begins by assuming that for the believer God is real and then asks what role this belief plays in his life, the important question of what it means to take God as real is left uninvestigated.

In this lecture, Kroesbergen will argue that a grammatical or philosophical investigation of religious language in the Wittgensteinian tradition can help, in this respect, to understand the kind of reality involved in religion. This does not mean that the researcher should take a personal stance regarding whether, for instance, God exists. A Wittgensteinian approach allows the researcher to analyse her own presuppositions about what it means for them to believe that God is real, in order to inquire more openly and neutrally what it means for the people under investigation to take God as real. Believing in or taking God as real can mean many different things, and a Wittgensteinian approach may help clarify what it means in a particular context.