Evaluation of Symbolic Language Flashcards
Strength: Tillich’s theory successfully captures the spiritual side of religious language
Tillich seems more successful than other approaches in capturing how everyday Christian language actually functions, especially its relation to spiritual experience.
When a Christian looks at a crucifix or prays, they can have deep spiritual feelings. This is often the most important thing to them. Tillich’s theory seems successful because the most important element of religious language is the spiritual feelings it evokes, not cold factual descriptive beliefs.
Weakness: William Alston objects that religious language must involve facts
Alston argues that important Christian doctrines like heaven and hell have to be taken as factual, not as symbolic. He claims “there is no point trying to determine whether the statement is true or false.”
Religion religion is concerned with objective factual things such as our salvation and afterlife. In that case, religious language cannot merely be symbolic.
John Hick makes a similar point, adding that philosophical language about God, such as God being non-dependent (necessary) is not symbolic.
Strength: Tillich seems to solve the problem of religious language.
Tillich seems to solve the difficulty of meaningfully talking about a God that is beyond our understanding. Religious language functions as a sort of spiritual or religious experience which connects human souls to God. We don’t need to understand God to be connected to God.
Religious language is meaningful insofar as it participates in being-itself, i.e, in God.
Weakness: The issue of the subjectivity and vagueness of ‘participation’.
Hick argues that Tillich’s flag illustration does not adequately explain how participation works.
Firstly it isn’t clear how a flag participates in the power and dignity of a nation. Secondly, it’s not clear whether religious symbols are supposed to participate in the ground of being (God) in the same way.
Finally, it is a traditional religious doctrine that there is a connection between God and nature. In some sense the world is already thought to participate in God already. So, it’s not clear how the way that symbols participate in the being of God is different to the way that everything else already does.
“Unfortunately Tillich does not fully define or clarify this central notion of participation … Does this symbol participate in Being-itself in the same sense as that in which a flag participates in the power and dignity of a nation? And what precisely is this sense?’-Hick
