Can religious language purely be understood by religious believers?

Statements such as 'Allah is the One' or 'God loves me' are confusing. They represent a set of religious beliefs that are often considered to be unknowable to those outside of the religion. Often there is no objectively agreed reality.

Wittgenstein said that to understand how language is used, one had to understand how it was being used ('ask not for its meaning, ask for its use) He said that language is hugely complex depending on the subject matter and for each type, referred to them as language games. e said that unless you understood that rules of that particular game you could not be able to see how it could be considered meaningful. Just as you cannot play jockey with the rules of chess, so you cannot play the language game of religion with science.

In this sense, you could say that Wittgenstein's view was the religious language can only be understood among believers because they alone would understand the beliefs and how it is used. Wittgenstein's view was anti-realist because of this.

However Swinburne said that religous language is equally valid as realist. When religious believers state their belief, it is not simply some agreed belief but it goes beyond that objective reality.

Braithwaite also said that religious language is meaningful to those outside of the faith just like moral claims are meaningful. He said that religious statements are simply an opinion of how to live life just as moral language is used. Therefore, religious language was meaningful despite the context because it is non-cognitive.

It s also worth asking what is meant by 'understood'. We can understand what the idea of love is. Aquinas would then say that through his argument of analogy, because we understand what love is in a human sense, we can understand it in a divine sense because we have that link. Therefore, religious language is not simply limited to religious believers.

As well as this, the emphasis on evangelism in certain faiths serves to show that actually through debate and questioning religious language can be meaningful even to the non-believer. Were this not the case, then religion would not still be considered an important part of society.