Religious Language Flashcards
Challenges to religious language
Contradictions/Paradox - God being the father, son and Holy Spirit at once
Gods transcendence - difficult to talk about as Christian’s believe he’s outside time + space
God in human terms - ‘God spoke to Moses’ does this mean God has a mouth?
3 proposed ways we can talk meaningfully about God
Moses Maimonides - via negativa
Aquinas - Analogy
Tillich - Symbol
Via Negativa
- it’s said that it may be more radical to say we can’t say anything about God at all
- We can say what God is not, but not what he is
- Eg. God is not a bike, not temporal and not mortal
Via Positiva
Doesn’t follow that we are able to be precise in our language about God
Although what we say about God is limited, it may still be positively indicative
Univocal language
Talking univocally is when the word means the same in any context - ‘oven is hot’ ‘desert is hot’
Equivocal language
a word having different meanings in different contexts - ‘cricketers hit the ball with a bat’, ‘a bat is in the cave’
Analogy
comparison between two things to highlight in which they are similar
Analogy of attribution - Aquinas
Using something attributed to God to reveal something larger about God
Eg. Using the urine of a bull to determine the health of the bull + bread of a baker shows you his skill
Causal relationship
meaningful to describe God as good as long as we can remember that God’s goodness is foremost as God is the cause of goodness
Analogy of proportion - Aquinas
Humans experiencing characteristics in proportion to how God has them
Eg. A little girl could be good at violin for a 7 year old, but a professional violinist could be much better proportionally
Hicks development
- Humans possess Gods qualities because they’re created in his image, yet because God is perfect - humans have his quantities in lesser proportion
- Just as a dogs faithfulness as smaller and more limited than humans faithfulness, our faithfulness is vastly smaller when compared to the faithfulness of God
