Analogy school part I
A theological gem for the banishment of idols
Gentle reader,
There are many neglected treasures in the trove of Christian thought. These are treasures that matter for the Christian life, treasures that can help us see the goodness of the good news and set us free from false idols which would demand our allegiance and threaten to bind us to false realities.
Today, I bring you one gem: the fact that language for God is analogical.
This may not sound like good news. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll do my best to demonstrate that it is.
The question:
What is the nature of theological language? When we talk about God, how does our language work?
The first, obvious, possible answer:
It works just like ordinary language works. (Theologians call this univocity. Feel free to ignore that if the vocab is not fun for you.)
If our language for God works like ordinary language, then if I use the word “good” in two different sentences, an ordinary sentence and a sentence about God, the word “good” will be doing the exact same thing in both sentences.
Consider two sentences.
If theological language is just like ordinary language, then “good” in sentence #1 is the same as “good” in sentence #2.
The cat’s goodness is identical to God’s goodness.
For most of us, it’s immediately obvious that this can’t be the case. My cat is good indeed, but God and my cat are quite different, and that difference is quite important.
To claim that ordinary language = theological language would be to deny the difference between God and creation. It would deny the mysterious, magnificent, majestic, holy, transcendent otherness of God.
It would reduce God to the ordinary. It would exchange “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Romans 1:22 NRSVUE). Or cats.
(There are a few theologians who maintain that theological language must be univocal, if we don’t want to be speaking nonsense. This seems, to me, sadly wooden and to not take seriously our very right and proper sense of the vast difference between God and my cat.)
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
So, we need another alternative:
Perhaps the two kinds of language don’t have anything to do with each another. Perhaps the two kinds of language have no meaningful relationship.
I can say, “meet me at the river bank” and “put your money in the bank.” Even though both sentences say “bank,” the two meanings are not the same. They’re unrelated.
I’m still free to say both that “my cat is good” and “God is good,” but the goodness of the first sentence is unrelated to the goodness of the second. (Theologians call this equivocity.)
We’ve swung all the way in the opposite direction now. This option definitely acknowledges the otherness of God. But, if theological language is unrelated to ordinary language, then we don’t have any way to tell the truth about God. We’re denying that God is the God who wants us to know that truth and has chosen to reveal Godself in many ways, most importantly, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the written word of Scripture.
(There are a few theologians who argue that theological language does work like this: that it’s essentially meaningless to speak of God because God is so very other, and so we have no access to divine truth. But, if we believe that the Word has been made flesh and we have seen his glory, we can’t agree).
Obviously, we’re looking for a third way here.
Suppose ordinary language and theological language relate by analogy.
My cat’s goodness and God’s goodness are not the same. But my cat’s goodness does have a real relationship to God’s goodness.
There is an analogy between the ordinary word “good” and the theological word “good,” spoken of God.
Analogies do work. They speak truth.
And analogies have limits. They work, but they also don’t work.
If I tell you that my cat is like a marshmallow, puffed up from roasting but not burnt…
I have done some real work in introducing you to my cat. You know, now, of his whiteness, streaked with sandiness not unlike the gold of a roasted marshmallow, and you know of his puffy fluffiness; perhaps you get a glimpse of the improbable way his fluff makes him swell to four times his size or of the charcoal singe of his ear tips and feet.
The analogy makes meaning.
But the analogy has limits.
My cat may be marshmallowish in color and puff, but he is unlike a marshmallow in many ways. My marshmallow analogy tells you nothing of his purrspicacity nor of his leaping and pouncing glories. And you would be mistaken were you to suppose that he is marshmallicous in gelatinousness or edibility.
But you would never make that mistake, because the analogy depends on you knowing, ahead of time, something about both marshmallows and cats. The analogy works with your embodied experience and lived history. It works in your wisdom regarding both cats and marshmallows. It depends on community and time and tradition and culture and context.
Truth + limits. That’s the glory of analogy.
The cat/marshmallow analogy tells you more about my cat than if I had told you only that he is white and fluffy. But it also, crucially, respects the limits of what you can know about my cat, given that he has never swished his tail at you or kissed you with his sandpaper tongue.
Why does this matter? It matters because we scurry about, so often, acting as though our language for God is not analogical. We act, instead, as if our language for God works just like ordinary language, as if we know exactly what it means when we call God “good” or “righteous” or “powerful.”
And this is a dreadful mistake. Sometimes it is a faith destroying mistake. It means that we are speaking of false gods, of gods whose “goodness” or “power” look exactly like what we already thought goodness or power looked like anyway. Of gods we have imagined through our ordinary human experience alone and not through the lens of scripture.
Like this guy, maybe:
More, what we already thought we knew about goodness or power was surely shaped—misshaped—by sin. We know no goodness untouched by sin, and so to go about as though we know exactly what we’re talking about when we say things like “God is good” is very often to describe a false god, a god who is NOT the holy one of Israel and the Loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. A god whose “goodness” is, instead, selfish desire or vain conceit.
Learning to recognize the limits of our analogies for God is holy, truth-telling work.
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:33-36).
So, here is a ward against idolatry. We must take heed lest we fall to the fashioning of false gods made in the images of our own sad, sinful ideas about goodness or power or righteousness.
And here is freedom from idolatry and from the tyrannical demands of false idols. The God we worship IS good. Analogically, the god we worship is even a little something like my good cat. But the God we worship is also OTHER than goodness as we think we know it. The God we worship is holy, mysterious, transcendent, righteous, and mighty to save.
And all our language for God is analogical.
Join me, next time, for analogy school part II, where we’ll explore the beautifully human ways analogies make beautiful meaning. And, in analogy school part III, we’ll connect all our analogies to Jesus.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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“Purrspicacity” got me, I may never recover 😂
Take me to analogy school part 2, 3, and 4! This is really helpful content for thinking about how we speak of God.
I like what you wrote about language being embedded in a social-cultural matrix.” The analogy works with your embodied experience and lived history......It depends on community and time and tradition and culture and context.”