Religious Language 1

Question 1

Via Negativa

Answer 1

God is transcendental, completely outside of our knowledge. Therefore, we cannot use our insufficient human language to make assertions about him. Instead, we can describe Him through negation, avoiding positively attributing qualities to Him, yet still gaining a sense of what God is.

Question 2

Via Negativa- Pseudo Dionysius

Answer 2

God is ‘beyond assertion’ AND ‘beyond denial’. He is utterly transcendental, totally ineffable, indescribable and incapable of being conceptualised.

Question 3

Via Negativa- Maimonides

Answer 3

Religious Language is useful when used negatively. For example, by describing what a ship is not, we gain a better understanding of what a ship is.

Question 4

Via Negativa- Religious Experience and Meister Eckhart

Answer 4

St Teresa of Avila had a religious experience that she describes, saying ‘I had not seen (God) at all’, yet she “could not help realising that he was beside (her), and that (she) saw and felt this clearly. Despite this being contradictory, it helps us understand that religious experience, or God himself, is completely beyond all words. Eckhart argued that the more we experience God the more we realise our language is useless in being able to convey such experiences. Every assertion about God must be negated, which moves us not to unbelief but to the belief and experience that God is beyond all words.

Question 5

Via Negativa- B. Davies

Answer 5

It is simply not at all helpful

Question 6

Via Negativa- Aquinas

Answer 6

It is possible to say something about God’s nature, although the meaning of out language changes when applied to God. Rejects the via negative on the grounds that when believers talk about ‘the living God’ they mean more than ‘God is not dead’.

Question 7

Via Negativa- strengths

Answer 7

• Safeguards against all heresies
• Prevents anthropomorphisms, or attributing human qualities to God
• Avoids manipulating to divine to suit our own ideas of Him and bringing Him down to human levels
• Encourages a sense of awe and respect

Question 8

Via Negativa- weaknesses

Answer 8

• We cannot say much about God this way
• It does not move us much beyond silence
• Denial implies assertion anyway
• Could lead to agnosticism
• The Bible reveals the nature of God

Question 9

Via Positiva

Answer 9

Aquinas’ approach, based on using analogy to describe God. It is not using negative language, or making direct assertions about God, but positively describing Him through comparison.

Question 10

Via positiva- Issues with language

Answer 10

Aquinas argues that we can use neither univocal language (language meaning the same thing in all situations), because words like ‘good’ mean different things when describing things in out world as opposed to describing God’, or equivocal language (language meaning different things in different situations), because this makes describing God as ‘good’ completely unintelligible, because ‘good’ means something completely different from ‘God-good’.

Question 11

Via postiva- Aquinas’ reason

Answer 11

God being perfect and infinite means he could defy description. We cannot speak of God univocally or equivocally, so we need to find a way to indirectly describe Him- hence analogy. Using comparison avoids saying God is just like something or nothing like something. It also us to broadly say what God is like.

Question 12

Via positiva- the forms of analogy

Answer 12

Attribution
Proper Proportion
Improper Proportion

Question 13

Via Positiva- Attribution

Answer 13

As God created the world, we can expect the world to reflect God in some way. Therefore, we can draw analogies between the world and God. For example, the urine of a bull will reflect the health of the bull, but is not the same as the health of said bull. The world is reflective of God’s goodness, but not equivalent to it, so it is meaningful but limited. Order of reference- God’s goodness is foremost as the source of this quality, and the world shows God’s goodness only in a secondary respect.

Question 14

Via positiva- Proper and Improper proportion

Answer 14

John Hick develops Aquinas’ views- humans possess God’s qualities because we are created in his image, but God is perfect, so we have his qualities in a lesser proportion. For example, humans and dogs are both faithful, but there is a great different between this quality in a person and in an animal. Still, there is a reasonable similarity, or we would not recognise the dogs as faithful. There is a ‘dim and imperfect likeness’.
An analogy which is just a metaphor and does not deal with proportionate qualities is one of improper proportion, like ‘God is a rock’.

Question 15

Via positiva- Swinburne

Answer 15

Swinburne argues that we can use language to talk about God and humans as ‘good’ univocally. They just possess goodness in different ways- it is still the same essential quality. Therefore, Aquinas has produced an unnecessary theory.

Question 16

Via positiva- Darwin and Dawkins

Answer 16

We are not really created in the image and likeness of God (evolution/atheism)

Question 17

Via positiva- St Paul

Answer 17

We cannot accurately express God until we ‘see’ him.

Question 18

Via positiva- weaknesses

Answer 18

• If goodness in our world is reflective of God, surely the evil is too
• We many dispute whether humans really were created in the image and likeness of God
• By using analogy we lose the meaning and purpose behind what we are trying to communicate

Question 19

Via positiva- Ian Ramsey

Answer 19

Models and qualifiers; models serve as a simple tool so we can understand something more complex, but they can only provide a limited understanding. Models need a qualifier to explain the gap between the model and the original. So analogy is an appropriate way of referring to God.

Question 20

Symbols- difference between symbols and signs

Answer 20

A sign points to a fact about something, as does a symbol, but the symbol also participates in what they point to. Argued by Tillich.

Question 21

Symbolic- four key features of symbols

Answer 21

• they point to something beyond themselves
• they participate in that to which they point
• they open up levels of reality which otherwise are closed to us
• they open up dimensions of the soul which correspond to those aspects of reality

Question 22

Symbolic- importance of symbols

Answer 22

With art, one can hear a description of an artwork, but without a doubt will not gain as impactful an appreciation of it without seeing it themselves. A novel could open up dimensions of the soul, could give us a new understanding of good and evil, or a painting could speak to us of determination and courage. There is a kind of personal participation here.

Question 23

Symbolic- Dharma Wheel

Answer 23

A religious symbol, such as the Dharma wheel; points to Buddhism and its values, participates in what it points to by being circular to show perfection, spikes to show penetrating insights, four spokes to show the four noble truths, open up levels of reality and dimensions of the soul.

Question 24

Symbolic- Cross

Answer 24

Points to the religion of Christianity, is the thing on which Jesus was crucified, draws people in to participate in what they see as the reality of the messiah, reminds Christians of Jesus’ sacrifice and redemption, and is a prompt for prayer, worship and meditation.

Question 25

Symbolic- functions of symbol

Answer 25

J.H.Randall argued that symbols work by
- motivating, firing up emotions and inspiring people to action
- socially binding people with the same understanding of the symbol
- communicating things that are not literal
- disclosing, revealing hidden depths to us about spiritual matters

Question 26

Symbolic- weaknesses

Answer 26

• visual prompts will be much more subjective and open to interpretation
• meanings can change over time depending on changing contexts
• Tillich’s actual definitions of what a symbol is are confusing- how can a symbol either participate in the meaning, or open up new dimensions of reality
• Tillich says signs can be replaces for reasons of expediency or convention, which symbols cannot- but symbols do get replaced over time. Ichthys was a symbol of the Christian faith and no longer is. This symbol recalls the many references to fish made in the gospels, translates to ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour’ (however it does correlate to Tillich’s description of how symbols slowly die when they no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression)

Question 27

Symbolic- Strengths

Answer 27

• asserts the inadequacy of language- analogies conceal more than they reveal, so symbolic expressions enable meaning to be found
• guards against the idolatry of thinking of God as though a greatly magnified human being
• universal

Question 28

Symbolic- John Hick

Answer 28

Tillich’s idea of participating is unclear. There is little difference between a symbol and a sign.

Question 29

Symbolic- William Alston

Answer 29

Symbols are meaningless because we don’t know whether they’re true or not