Theology within the Bounds of Language: A Methodological Tour

7. Making Sense

Chapter 7 ‫ﱾﱻ‬ Making Sense Chapter 5 noted one major upshot of the Principle of Relative Similarity, which chapter 6 further assessed: the principle, identifying what makes statements true, can and should guide our predication. This is how we should speak. Now we can note another important ramification: by specifying the truth-conditions of utterances, the principle can largely allay misgivings concerning the meaningfulness of theological discourse. From early times, Christian thinkers have acknowledged that God largely transcends our knowledge and our words. In the last century, philosophical critics went farther. Talk about God, they repeatedly asserted, does not make sense. Kai Nielsen’s complaints are typical: We cannot understand what it would be for such a being to act and thus to be loving, merciful or just, for these predicates apply to things that a person does. But we have no understanding of “a person” without “a body” and it is only persons that in the last analysis can act or do things. We have no understanding of “disembodied action” or “bodiless doing” and thus no understanding of “a loving but bodiless being.”1 Clearly, we cannot understand these things in the sense of imagining them; but “understand” is not synonymous with “imagine.” As one writer has observed, “Whether I can imagine it or not, a thousand-sided polygon, an animal that’s a cross between a walrus and a wasp, and a color different from any we have ever seen, are all logically possible; we need not stop to ask whether we can imagine them.”2 How and in what sense, though, can such hypotheses, and those Nielsen cites, be “understood”? How can Nielsen and like-minded critics be answered? 65 66 Theology within the Bounds of Language The traditional response relies on analogy. Using “love” as illustration , one writer describes this appeal as “an attempt to find a position between the two extremes; in speaking about God and man the term ‘love’ is to be used neither in two absolutely different senses nor in one exactly identical sense, but in an analogical sense, which is to say that one love is similar to the other, where ‘similar’ means neither ‘absolutely different’ nor ‘absolutely identical.’ To be similar is therefore to combine sameness and otherness, continuity and discontinuity in a peculiar way.”3 Reference to “one exactly identical sense” sounds problematic (confer chapter 2), but let it pass for now. The indicated scheme is roughly this: on one side stands “univocal” predication (e.g., “human being” predicated of Galileo and Einstein); on the other hand stands “equivocal” predication (e.g., “club” predicated of a weapon and a social entity); and between them slips analogical predication (e.g., “loving” predicated of humans and of God). Thus, Aquinas, for example, insisted that terms such as “good” and “wise” are not predicated univocally of God and of humans, but analogously. God’s goodness and wisdom far transcend those of creatures, yet the resemblance between the created and divine analogs suffices to legitimate application of the same terms to God as to creatures. “Thus God is called wise,” Aquinas explains, “not simply because he begets wisdom but because, insofar as we are wise, we imitate to some extent the divine source of our wisdom.”4 This account is still current. Thus, Norris Clarke, for example, in replying to Nielsen, has stressed “the principle, handed down to St. Thomas by both the Neoplatonic and the Aristotelian traditions, that every effect must in some way resemble its cause. In a word, every causal bond sets up at the same time a bond of intrinsic similarity in being.”5 Hence, God’s creatures resemble their creator, and creaturely predicates can be applied to him. Evidently, though, not just any kind or degree of similarity warrants such predicates’ application, or else we would have to say that the creator of trees is a tree, the creator of mice is a mouse, and so forth. But once we try to indicate more precisely the nature and degree of the requisite similarity, no account that fails to mention rival, alternative expressions can succeed. Even close similarity may fail the test of truth if it is not “relative similarity”—that is, the kind specified by PRS. Thus, crimson may closely resemble scarlet and might be called scarlet were it not for the competing claim of the rival term crimson. Trees may closely resemble bushes and might be called bushes were it not for the competing claim of the rival term...