Analogy, Dialectic and Inter-Confessional Theology

ANALOGY, DIALECTIC AND INTER-CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGY * STRICTLY SPEAKING, analogy is a common phenomenon of language, occurring whenever a predicate is transferred from a proposition where it is obviously at home to another where, because of the subject of the sentence, it seems oddly placed. As such, it hardly merits, the dramatic roles that have sometimes been assigned it in theology, either by those who mistakenly call it the analogy of being and somehow think they endorse that, or 'by those who see in it a barely camouflaged claim to Roman supremacy in the church of Christ. In inter-confessional discussion it soon becomes clear, however , that wherever the influence of Karl Barth still makes itself felt, even if only as a memory of a starting-point, there is a deeply experienced feeling that analogy is bound up with natural theology, with rationalism and with all that is wrong with Catholic theology. Even if explanations about the true nature of analogy are received sympathetically and when it is agreed that the early Barth's Catholic sources were misleading, there still remains a conviction that analogy, if no longer to be personified as the anti-Christ, is at least the apple that gives the barrel of Catholic theology its special and rather disagreeable flavor. This seems to be due in part to the fact that the metaphysics implied in theological analogy appears to some as no longer presenting a valid intellectual option; in part also, * The reflections presented here are developed from a paper read by the author at a seminar of the " troisieme cycle " held by the theological faculties of the Universities of Fribourg, Lausanne, Geneva, and Neuchatel during the year 1980-81. The Faculty of Fribourg is Catholic, the other three Reformed. The papers read are collected in P. Gisel, ed., Analogie. et dialectique, Geneva, Labor et Fides, 198(t. 48 44 COLMAN E. O'NEILL, O.P. and perhaps at a more instinctive level, to a deep distrust of anything that appears to promote that unwarranted serenity of spirit which takes refuge in a so-called theology of glory. A theology of the cross, on the contrary, welcomes the intellectual tool of the dialectic which seems to reflect much more faithfully the dramatic contrasts of the New Testament as well as the struggle of Christian existence and the plight of the world we live in. The very fact that the differences, in terms of methodology, between Catholic and Reformed theology could be formulated as a clash between analogy and dialectic indicates the need for further clarification on both sides. It will be suggested here that it seems to be the case that a theology using analogy can, and ought to, take up the insights of dialectic thinking, though it is clearly not possible that it should accept its intuition of reality as the most basic in Christianity. The clarification that this claim calls for should also be of service in determining one of the relationships which obtain between systematic and biblical theology, since this is quite possibly what the discussion is all about. The key to both these questions will be said to lie in the proposition that the analogical method can be developed into a general hermeneutic that has to be called into play in all interpretations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This may seem a far call from our opening remark that analogy is a common and simple linguistic phenomenon . There must be more to it than that, so let us define terms. Analogy and theological method Analogy is a particular form of predication, that is, of attributing a predicate to the subject of a sentence. It occurs only when we have to do with at least two propositions. This is because it makes sense to speak otanalogical predication only in the case where the proposition we are concerned with uses a predicate which, if defined strictly, belongs to a proposition with a different kind of subject. Evidently, once the subject of the proposition we are concerned with refers to something, ANALOGY, DIALECTIC AND INTER-CONFESSIONAL THEOLOGY 45 real or imagined, lying outside the realm of ordinary observation , we are going to find analogical predication. This is...