Analogy in Theology

Analogy in Theology

Religious discourse has been under scrutiny since ancient Greece when Anaxagoras said if oxen and dogs could paint, they would depict the gods in their own likenesses. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures depict the divine being in vivid humanlike traits while conveying the divine otherness, mystery, immateriality, and eternity. Thus there are religious currents of anthropomorphism, of transcendentalism, of metaphor and symbolism, and of literalism about the being and nature of God. The Greek philosophical ancestry of Western culture presents the divine as immaterial, immutable, everlasting, perfect, and incomprehensible. Both the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysicians developed theories of analogical predication that were later extended to theology, the study of the revealed divinity.

Theologians used a theory of analogy that had three parts: analogy of being (of reality between God and world, and among created realities, too); analogy of meaning (of words and concepts); and analogical thinking (of conception by proportionalities). The aim was to explain how words that apply to sensible things also adapt in meaning to apply literally, not only metaphysically, to the transcendent deity known only by inference, revelation, or mystical experience. Words applied to God—"wise" and "good," for example—are neither entirely equivocal (such as bank/savings; bank/river), nor merely metaphorical (drop/an argument), but rather, they are analogous; that is, they adjust in ways explained below to the context, just as words generally adjust to contrasting contexts, say, as "knows"/the way differs from "knows"/arithmetic, and as "exist" does in "there exist /trees/species/numbers/shapes." Metaphysics articulates theoretical truth-conditions for such statements and for ordinary religious beliefs—conditions not accessible without such metaphysics—the way science states the molecular structure for water.

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