theology

The Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. Discuss [40]

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Protestant Christians have faith “Sola Scriptura”, seeing Christian Ethics as Theonomous and based only on God’s commands… usually as found in Scripture, which is understood to be the Words of God and Inerrant. Despite this, relatively few Protestants would accept that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide because there are some subjects on which the Bible says nothing (such as Abortion, IVF, Assisted Dying) and because even where the Bible does speak, what is said is in need of interpretation. As a result, the Bible is not a comprehensive moral guide.

Firstly, even Karl Barth rejected the claim that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. Barth criticised both Natural Theology and Natural Law, the Roman Catholic claim that we can discover most of what is right and wrong using reason, because he believed that this has been corrupted by the Fall. Drawing on the writings of St Paul and St Augustine, Barth argued that we are saved by grace and faith and not because of anything we have done (Ephesians 2:8), suggesting that we can’t discover God’s existence or nature using reason and neither can we discover right and wrong, let alone use this knowledge to earn our own salvation by works (the Pelagian heresy). For Barth, knowledge of God and what is good must be revealed and this revelation is for most people through Scripture. Yet Barth also criticised the view that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. This is because Scripture is not itself God’s revelation, but rather witness to God’s revelation through Jesus and the Prophets. Being only a record of what was revealed, rather than revelation, it should be seen as a human creation and subject to some errors and omissions, however minor. For Barth, as for Bonhoeffer, Christians should reflect on their reading of Scripture as a whole and on the example of Jesus when making moral decisions autonomously and personally, rather than trying to follow lines of the Bible individually on face value. Today, scholars such as NT Wright and Peter Enns agree with Barth’s approach to Biblical Ethics. For NT Wright, the narrative or story of the Bible is true and inerrant, but the idea that isolated parts can be taken literally out of context and without proper interpretation is mistaken. Similarly, Enns points out that the Bible is a human creation which reflects its cultural contexts and authors’ perspectives. Surely, God speaks through scripture, but it should not be understood as a transcript of God’s words, let alone as a comprehensive guide to God’s thinking on moral issues. Biblical Criticism supports the approach to Scripture taken by Barth, Wright and Enns. Textual analysis has shown that the Bible was written by multiple authors and repeatedly redacted, as well as that the historical, political and theological concerns of the authors and redactors are reflected in the text. Given this, as well as the existence of multiple translations and editions of the Bible, it is hard to see that it is intellectually credible to argue that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide.

In addition, the Roman Catholic Church, while upholding the principle of Biblical Inerrancy, dismisses the idea that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. For Roman Catholics, Scripture is one source of moral authority among others, including Tradition and Reason (Natural Law). As Aquinas pointed out, Scripture needs to be read as a whole and through “the lens of doctrine” or it can seem to give guidance that contradicts reason and/or Christian tradition. For example, in Romans 2:6 the Bible says “God will repay each one according to his deeds.” and of course Matthew 25 says much the same thing through the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, while the Bible also says that people are saved by Grace and Faith and not because of anything they have done in Ephesians 2:8-9. This seems contradictory and could lead an individual Protestant who reads the Bible to believe that they are saved because of good works and perhaps that anybody who does good works will be saved, while this contradicts Christian tradition which is clearly Sola Gratia and exclusivist. Roman Catholics point out that following Church Teachings, which are informed by Tradition and Reason as well as Scripture, which itself is interpreted “through the lens of doctrine” and as a whole rather than in isolated parts, guards against being led into error in this way. Of course, evangelical Protestants will reject this argument that Christian Ethics should be Heteronomous, reasoning that the Bible itself says that the Holy Spirit will guide those who God has saved to the truth, so they do not misunderstand God’s will when reading Scripture. “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” John 16:13 Yet Roman Catholics would reject this and say that this is a very particular interpretation of this passage and does not explain how faithful Christians can read Scripture and end up with multiple interpretations of what it says. If having the “right interpretation” depends on having been saved and having “wrong interpretations” is symptomatic of having not received God’s Grace and Spirit, then when multiple interpretations exist amongst God’s fearing and good people – as is evidenced by the multiplicity of Protestant denominations for example – how is anybody to know what the “right interpretation” and God’s law is? The result of arguing that Scripture is a comprehensive moral guide is to leave Christian Ethics up to the consciences of individuals, giving them license to believe that anything that they feel led to believe is what God commands. This is not a practical approach to Christian Ethics. The Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe believed that he was led by God to murder women, quoting his readings of scripture to justify his heinous crimes… can anybody really say that he should have listened to his conscience and that he was right to do so when it led him to break God’s sixth Commandment (Exodus 20:13) as well as the whole of Christian tradition and reason? While Acts 5:29 does say “we must obey God rather than human beings”, suggesting that doing what is right may well break social norms and even religious teachings, the argument that Christian Ethics consists in following one’s personal “conscience” wherever it leads, provided that these leadings were inspired by one’s reading of the Bible in some way (however idiosyncratic or irrational), is difficult to defend. This suggests that the Bible is not a comprehensive moral guide.

On the other hand, the Bible itself suggests that it is a comprehensive moral guide – at least in parts – so Protestants who have faith Sola Scriptura and uphold Biblical Inerrancy may feel bound to accept that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. St Paul wrote that “all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching… so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work…” 2 Timothy 3:16-17; this implies that the Bible is a complete moral handbook for Christians. On the other hand, Roman Catholics have pointed out that this quotation is taken out of context, ignoring the preceding sentence “continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it” 2 Timothy 3:14, which suggests that there are sources of authority besides the Bible. Further, there are other passages in the Bible which suggest that there are moral authorities outside of Scripture. Romans 13:1 affirms “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” suggesting that Christians should obey those who have power and worldly authority as well as the “plain word of Scripture”. This is confirmed by Hebrews 13:17. Further, the Bible also says that ignorant people can misinterpret Scripture, suggesting that Luther was wrong to suggest that “A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a cardinal without it.” St Peter wrote of St Paul’s letters – amongst which 2 Timothy purports to be – that “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” 2 Peter 3:16, suggesting that it is possible for people to be misled by the word of Scripture and that additional education may be necessary to understand its true meaning. In this way, the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the authority of Scripture – that it must be acknowledged as “teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.” Dei Verbum but that the Church holds the authority to interpret it, to discover and communicate that truth to ordinary people, handed down from St Peter who received it from Jesus (Matthew 18:18) – is more persuasive than the minority Protestant view that Scripture is a comprehensive moral guide. Further, using the inerrancy of the Bible to justify having faith in the inerrancy and completeness of the Bible is a circular argument which as such is unconvincing. Nevertheless, Evangelical Protestants such as RC Sproul, JI Packer and more recently Wayne Grudem have argued that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide. They stress Biblical Inerrancy, arguing that faith in God means faith in God’s word in scripture. If one doubts the Bible and its teaching in any part, it is the same as doubting God’s authority and not consistent with being a Christian. St Augustine made this point, as did Harold Lindsell in “The Battle for the Bible”, published in 1978, the same year that many Protestant leaders signed up to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Yet, despite signing the Chicago Statement on inerrancy, even Evangelical scholars like Wayne Grudem stop short of claiming that the Bible is a comprehensive moral guide today, because the Bible does not address many contemporary moral issues. He wrote “the Bible always tells the truth, and it always tells the truth concerning everything that it talks about.” This suggests that there may be things that the Bible does not talk about, about which it does not tell the truth, and so that the Bible is not a comprehensive moral guide.

In conclusion, the Bible is not a comprehensive moral guide. This is accepted by Protestant authorities such as Karl Barth as well as by the Roman Catholic Church and is supported by reason, evidence and even some parts of the Bible itself. Even those few evangelical protestant scholars who seem to support this claim stop short of actually endorsing the idea that the Bible is a comprehensive or complete guide when it comes to modern moral issues.

To what extent is the cosmological argument a sufficient explanation for the existence of God? [40]

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The cosmological argument has its roots in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, but is most associated with Aquinas’ first, second and third ways to demonstrate God’s existence and today with William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument.  While cosmological arguments see God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe, overall, they do not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God.

Firstly, Leibniz’ version of the cosmological argument saw God as the “sufficient reason” for the universe. God is needed, he reasoned, to explain why there is anything at all. In “The Existence of God” Richard Swinburne writes how this is the most basic and persuasive argument for God’s existence.  Leibniz’ reasoning built on Aquinas’ third way, which started with the premises that everything in the universe is contingent and that something cannot come from nothing, concluding that there must be a necessary being – a being which exists because of itself and cannot not exist – to explain the existence of everything else. Yet Kant rejected this line of argument in the introduction to his “Critique of Pure Reason”, pointing out that as everything that we experience exists contingently, necessary existence is not something we can posit or discuss.  For Kant, to exist is to exist contingently and to be capable of non-existence… the idea of necessary existence is contradictory and impossible. While there are those who reject Kant’s argument and indeed his whole worldview, such as Willard Quine and Charles Hartshorne, it remains the dominant position in philosophy. While Kant may not have shown that necessary existence is impossible, his observation that it falls outside the scope of our experience strongly supports that conclusion.  This shows that God is not needed to be the necessary explanation for the universe we experience.

Secondly, as David Hume observed through his character Philo in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, despite being presented as deductive proofs for God’s existence cosmological arguments fail because there is no way to show that their premises are true. For example, Aquinas starts his first way with the premises that everything in the universe is moved and that things can’t move themselves, concluding that there must therefore be a Prime Mover and that this is what everybody calls God. As Hume pointed out, there is no way to know if everything in the universe is moved or that no thing can move itself because our experience of the universe is too limited to support such sweeping claims.  It is possible that while things in the universe are moved and must be moved by other things, the universe itself could be unmoving and/or self-moving.  As Bertrand Russell later asked, why should not the universe itself be considered a “brute fact”?  Although Big Bang theory seems to have falsified the idea that the Universe could be considered a “brute fact,” in other ways science supports Hume’s scepticism, finding that sub-atomic particles like Quarks do not follow standard laws of causation and logic and forcing William Lane Craig to use more limited premises in his Kalam argument than Aquinas did in his Cosmological Argument.  Craig reasons that since “everything that begins to exist must have a cause” and “the universe began to exist” it follows that “the universe must have a cause”.  Although it strategically stops short of concluding that the cause of the universe is “what everybody calls God” – leaving this for people to infer – Craig’s argument seems persuasive in the context of a layman’s understanding of the standard model of Physics. Yet, Stephen Hawking criticised his argument for assuming that causation must or even could apply where there is no time or space at and before the Big Bang. This shows that the cosmological argument fails to demonstrate God’s existence

On the other hand, other versions of the cosmological argument have been presented as inductive or even abductive arguments, suggesting that God is the most probable explanation for many observations of movement, causation, contingency and other forms of order in the universe.  This approach acknowledges that science could provide natural explanations for these phenomena, but dismisses these as less probable than the simple, elegant explanation provided in God. Yet, while the prime mover, uncaused cause or necessary being supported by Aquinas’ ways seems   to be a simpler explanation than the complex natural accounts presented by science, as Hume pointed out, the prime mover, if such there is, would be very far from being “what everybody calls God.”  In terms of prime movers, uncaused causes or necessary beings, there could be several for all we know and it/they would hardly need to be personal, immanent or good.  Also, the God of the Bible is nothing if not a complex character, being possessed of many characteristics outside the scope of those possessed by the prime mover, so that Richard Dawkins was right to reject the claim that “God” could ever be a simpler explanation in “The God Delusion”.  While Aquinas did attempt to show how the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being demonstrated by the cosmological argument was really the God of Christianity, these explanations were outside the scope of the cosmological arguments and unconvincing.  For example, Aquinas claimed that because God is the prime mover, uncaused cause and necessary being He must be timeless-eternal and outside the universe.  It follows that divine attributes like power, knowledge or goodness must be understood as analogies when describing God. Yet Aquinas’ classical theism is unconvincing because although it attempts to provide a philosophical justification for believing that “God” exists – not least through the cosmological argument – this justification is flawed and comes at the price of undermining both the Bible and Christian Doctrine as sources of knowledge about God.  This shows that inductive or abductive versions of the cosmological argument are no more useful as explanations for God’s existence than deductive versions.

Further, all versions of the cosmological argument are part of Natural Theology, the attempt to explain that and how God exists using reason. Natural Theology has long been controversial within Christianity, because it assumes that human beings can discover God and potentially salvation for themselves without God’s grace, which idea was dismissed by St Paul (e.g. Ephesians 2:8) and later made a heresy because of St Augustine’s theological arguments.  It follows that for most Christians Natural Theology cannot provide sufficient knowledge of God’s existence or concerning God’s nature for human beings to attain salvation apart from God’s grace.  Instead, Christians must rely on Revealed Theology, such as through Scripture, Jesus and/or personal religious experience, to demonstrate God’s existence, nature and will.  In one way, this makes sense of the cosmological arguments’ failure to show that God is the necessary or even the most probable explanation of the universe and of the disjunct between the attributes of the prime mover and the God of the Bible.  It could be that the cosmological argument, and wider Natural Theology, provides only an indication that God exists, showing that faith is rational and that atheists are as St Paul put it “without excuse”, while maintaining the necessity of revelation and grace for salvation. Yet it seems terribly convenient that Christian doctrine should so cover for the failure of Natural Theology and the cosmological argument. St Paul and St Augustine would both have been aware of versions of the cosmological argument in the work of Plato and Aristotle and that these arguments are not sufficient explanations for the God of Christianity.  Could their theological arguments have been pragmatic rather than principled in their attempt to sideline reason in favour of revelation?

In conclusion, the cosmological argument does not provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God. None of the versions of the argument succeed in demonstrating God’s existence. Deductive versions rely on uncertain premises and don’t contain the full conclusion of the Christian God’s existence. Inductive and abductive versions fail to establish that “God” is a simpler explanation of the universe than natural explanations provided by science.  Also, theological attempts to explain why Natural Theology should fail are unconvincing.

Aquinas successfully demonstrates that religious language should be understood in terms of analogy. Discuss. [40]

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As the Summa Theologica makes clear, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to religious language emerged from his concept of God.  As a Classical Theist, Aquinas saw God as timeless eternal, meaning that words applied to God cannot be understood univocally, to mean the same as they would when applied to created things. While the Bible, the Creeds and Christian doctrines use language univocally in ways that make God seem like a person, subject to limitation and change, for Aquinas God is timelessly other and should not be so anthropomorphised and limited by language.  He saw some merits in the apophatic approach to language, which speaks of God by negation if at all seeing direct religious language as equivocal, but wanted to preserve the possibility of affirming some things about God in a meaningful way, recognising that an equivocal approach to language undermines philosophy and doctrine in a way that must eventually be fatal to organised religion.  The result was Aquinas’ argument that words applied to God should be understood as analogies which is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving in to equivocalism, although it depends heavily on his concept of God and so may not be useful to all Christians.

Firstly, Aquinas claimed that claims such as “God is good” should not be taken to imply that God is morally good, such as would imply choice and the existence of independent values but should instead be understood as analogies of proportion. When we say that something is good, we mean that it largely fulfils its nature.  Human nature is to be free and moral, but if God is the origin of our freedom and of moral values it makes little sense to anthropomorphise him by assuming his nature is like ours.  Nothing in this world is perfect; because of time and space nothing can fulfil 100% of its nature.  For example, a person has the potential to be a baby and an adult.  However good they are, they can only fulfil part of their potential at one time, such as by being a good adult.  Nevertheless, God is outside the time and space that holds us back from actualising our full potential and being perfect. When we say that God is good, we mean that God fulfils 100% of his timeless divine nature, being changelessly perfect; what it is for God to fulfil God’s nature is not what it means for us to fulfil our more limited nature.  John Hick used the example of a man and his dog, both of which might be said to be faithful. What it is for a man to be faithful and for a dog to be faithful are not quite the same, but by saying they are faithful we mean that both do a large proportion of what we expect of a faithful member of their species. It follows that our goodness is not the same as God’s goodness… the word good is not used univocally when applied to God… but there is a connection between our goodness and God’s goodness which means that words applied to God are not equivocal either.   In this way, Aquinas’ analogy of proportion is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving into equivocalism.

Secondly, Aquinas claimed that attributes like goodness exist primarily in God as the creator and only secondarily in created things, so that what we say about God and created things is connected while still having different meanings and preserving the otherness of God. To explain his analogy of attribution, Aquinas used the example of a bull and its urine… the health of the bull is primary and the health of the urine it produces is secondary… the health of the bull and its urine consist in different things, but the health of the one is the source of the health of the other, so there is a connection.  Simon Oliver uses the example of me and my breakfast yoghurt… both might be said to be healthy, but the healthiness of the yoghurt is secondary and depends on my healthiness, which is primary.  My health might consist in having clear skin, energy and a habit of going jogging… but the health of the yoghurt does not consist in any of these things.  In the same way, the goodness, power or wisdom of God is primary, and the goodness, power or wisdom of created things is secondary.  What it is for God to be good, powerful or wise might be radically different from what it means for a person to be these things, and not only by degree, avoiding limiting God through a univocal use of language.  Yet, there is a clear connection between the goodness, power and wisdom of God and of created creatures, which avoids an equivocal approach to religious language also. 

On the other hand, as Anthony Kenny pointed out the analogical meaning of God’s attributes preserved by Aquinas is extremely limited, making this approach to religious language unsuccessful when it comes to sustaining religion in a practical way.  Kenny suggested that the idea of timeless attributes such as goodness, power or wisdom seems “radically incoherent”, which is a fair criticism, as is the related point that many believers do not understand language analogically, even those who lead or have led the Church.  While Ian Ramsey was right to point out how people often use “qualifiers” like “timelessly” to signify that their use of words to describe God should not be taken as “ordinary language” but as religious language which is “logically odd”, in practice many people do not use such qualifiers or seem to understand that there should be any difficulty in using language univocally at all. Further, as Nelson Pike observed, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”.  It makes little sense to see God as timeless when that would make the creation, the fall and the resurrection simultaneous in God’s timeless vision. This is why Protestant philosophers look for other ways of understanding religious language, seeing Aquinas analogical approach as bound up in a concept of God which is fundamentally unchristian. John MacQuarrie lamented the adoption of the Greek concept of God into the Christian tradition, seeing this as the cause of multiple avoidable philosophical problems that have beset the faith through the best part of two millennia.  In this context, Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff approach religious language in a more straightforward univocal way.  Further, some Classical Theists support a more univocal approach to religious language than Aquinas.  For examples, St Anselm and John Duns Scotus reasoned that God as creator must have created the concepts through which we understand and speak of Him, meaning that we can speak confidently about God using a far wider range of words and meanings than Aquinas would allow.  All of this suggests that the success of Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is limited to those who share his concept of God and does not extend even to all of those.

In conclusion, Aquinas’ analogical approach to understanding religious language is coherent and persuasive if one shares his concept of God, although it is possibly too limited to support religious practice.  Nevertheless, many Christians do not accept either Aquinas’ concept of God or his analogical approach to understanding religious language because they choose to focus on revealed rather than on natural theology as the primary source of their knowledge of God.

Assess the view that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy enables us to speak significantly about God (40)

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Aquinas doctrine of analogy was intended to reconcile a philosophically credible concept of God, a God who is wholly “other”, with the human ability to speak about Him in meaningful terms.  Aquinas, who based his worldview on that of Aristotle, saw that God’s existence is best demonstrated a posteriori, from experience.  Four of his famous five ways show that God is what Aristotle called the “Prime Mover”, the originating and sustaining cause of everything which also defines the final cause of the universe and explains its teleological character.  This suggests that for Aquinas’ God, like Aristotle’s prime mover, is eternal outside time and space, impersonal and transcendent.  As Maimonides pointed out, this means that claims about God should not be understood univocally, because the edge of time and space – and thus possible experience – is like a “veil and partition” between God and us.  What it means for God to be good cannot be the same as what it means for a human being to be good… There is no time or choice for God, after all.  Nevertheless, Aquinas disagreed with Maimonides about the apophatic way being the only way to speak concerning God.  Aquinas saw that religion cannot be well supported by negative language, also pointing out that one has to have a clear concept of what God is to be able to decide what God is not.  Therefore, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy attempted to define what can be said about God in positive terms, steering people away from univocicity whilst preventing claims from being seen as equivocal either.  Nevertheless, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God.

Firstly, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is too limited to support the meaningfulness of morality.  For Aquinas, I can say that God is good meaningfully.  Through analogy of proportion, by saying that God is good I know that God is 100% actual and has no potential, because the meaning of goodness is that something fulfils its nature and God, being atemporal, can do nothing other than 100% fulfil his nature.  Further, through analogy of attribution, I know that God’s goodness is unlike human goodness and yet it has a causative relationship with human goodness in the way that the goodness of the baker or the bull has a causative relationship with the goodness of the bread or the urine.  Relatedly though more broadly, through Aquinas’ analogy of being, I know that the being of created contingent things is secondary to the primary being of God.  In the way that the healthiness of a yoghurt is secondary and the healthiness of the person who eats the yogurt is primary, so the being of God is primary and supports the being of all other things, although what it means for God to be and created things to be is not the same.  Nevertheless, knowing that God is 100% whatever God is and that his goodness and being enables things in the world to be good and be does not really tell me anything significant about God’s nature, other than perhaps that he intends things to fulfil their various natures as He fulfils His timelessly.  Aquinas built his theory of natural law on this analogical understanding of God’s nature and tried to extrapolate moral norms from it, suggesting that it is God’s will that human beings fulfil their common nature and that actions which contribute to this end are good.  Yet Natural Law struggles because there is no clear and consistent account of what the common human nature, that God wants us to fulfil in order to be good, is.  For one example, while Aquinas saw procreation as a necessary part of this human nature and thus essential to human goodness, Chappell and originally Finnis disagreed, not seeing procreation as a necessary part of human nature or essential to goodness at all.  Their position is strengthened by Aquinas own argument that some goods pertain to certain men more than others, hence a priest may be celibate because he is pursuing the good of praising God which conflicts with the good of having children in practice.  The fact that people can’t agree on what a common human nature entails, despite being able to experience and observe this, emphasizes how little content there can be within the claim “god is good” – or any other claim about God’s nature – when understood analogically. Further, having so little idea of what God’s goodness entails forces us to rely heavily on a contested definition of human nature, meaning that an analogical approach to religious language fails to support morality.  This shows that Aquinas doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God, because it only serves to emphasis how little we can know about God’s goodness and fails to support morality. 

Secondly, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not support the meaningfulness of the Bible or central documents such as the Nicene Creed.  From the Bible we know that God spoke on numerous occasions, appeared in visions and had relationships with Prophets and with Jesus, and yet again, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy emphasizes the “otherness” of God, which undermines these essentially Christian beliefs.  At least Maimonides admitted that Scripture should be read as myths and legends, yet Aquinas never went this far. According to Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy, we can only speak analogically of God because God is outside time and space and what Tillich later called “the ground of our being”, yet this is not the impression that (most of) the Bible gives.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the Bible’s God acts in a way that is “unavoidably tensed” and apparently at odds with an analogical interpretation of religious language.  For example, Aquinas would suggest that a claim that “God created the heavens and the earth” should not be understood univocally.  God’s creative act cannot be like a creative act of say a potter.  Rather, God’s creative act must be simple and single, as befits his timeless-eternal nature.  This means that all parts of God’s creative action are concurrent, just as all God’s various attributes are different ways of understanding God’s wholly simple nature.  There can be no division between parts of God’s act in creation, just as there can be no division between God’s goodness and power, his power and knowledge for examples.  How then can we make sense of the Biblical salvation narrative?  Analogically, Aquinas would have us believe that God’s act in creation is not like a human act, having no time before, during or after and no alternative possibilities.  How though can the creation be concurrent with the fall and with the incarnation and final judgement?  This makes no sense of central Christian doctrines.  Also, the doctrine of the Trinity is problematic, because it suggests that God is best understood through the three distinct persons of God.  Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy suggests otherwise… indeed we must focus on the very oneness of God to make sense of what we can say and mean analogically through proportion, attribution and being more generally.  This inability to support claims made in the Bible and creeds also shows that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is too limited to enable Christians to speak significantly of God. 

Of course, Aquinas’ theory of analogy has its supporters and indeed enables us to speak more significantly about God than does the via negativa.  Aquinas’ theory of analogy is highly influential within modern Roman Catholicism and has been developed by thinkers ranging from Ian Ramsey to Austin Farrar and Gerard Hughes.  Even John Hick praised Aquinas analogical approach to religious language.  Ramsey noted how people naturally see claims made about God as “logically odd.” When we use words like power or love in relation to God, we know that we don’t intend people to interpret them in the same way as they would in ordinary language.  Words are in a sense “models” of what we mean about God; just as a model of an atom in a science lab isn’t adequate to express the structure of the atom or the concept of the light-wave to express how light works, so the word “power” isn’t entirely adequate to express that attribute of God, but it is the best means of expression that we have.  Further, Ramsey noted that we use “qualifiers” such as “Holy” to indicate that we are using a “model”, that our claim is “logically odd” and that our intended meaning relative to God is not the same as the common meaning of words such as power or knowledge.  Hick praised this aspect of analogy noting that it allows us to speak significantly about God while also preserving the essential mystery and ineffability of the divine. Hughes suggested that the qualifier “timeless” is most appropriate to signify that words are being used analogically, drawing the mind to that part of a common meaning that makes sense in relation to the timeless nature of God.  Thus for the Thomist, when I say “God is good” I should say “God is timelessly good”, ruling out a moral interpretation of the claim which would be incompatible with God’s eternal nature.  This shows that an analogical approach to language fits in with modern Roman Catholic beliefs and usage, supporting the significance of some important things that Catholics say about God.  Yet Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language still fails to enable us to speak significantly about God for two reasons. 

  • Firstly because some Roman Catholic writers were critical of Aquinas’ analogical theory of religious language straight away.  For example, John Duns Scotus preferred the Cataphatic approach of St Anselm and St Bonaventure.  An analogical approach to language is, for Scotus, too limited to support significant religious beliefs and utterances.  Instead, Scotus argued that we should be able to speak univocally of God since the very concepts we use to describe and affirm his characteristics were created by God as part of his simple, single act of creation.  His approach owes more to Plato than it does to Aristotle, suggesting that God is more like the Form of the Good, giving definition to the concepts through which we experience reality and so knowable through reason and describable in ordinary language.
  • Secondly, because while analogy does seem intuitive to those whose worldview includes a timeless-eternal God, it is less so for those whose worldview includes a personal, immanent God.  How is the claim that God is timelessly wise, as Hughes might have it, compatible with the claim that God knows “the inmost secrets of our hearts” as the Psalmist affirms, let alone with the claim that God hears and answers prayers?  God’s wisdom should not be understood univocally, and should only be taken to mean that God has 100% of the knowledge appropriate to God, being timeless, and that God’s knowledge and our knowledge have a causative relationship of some sort, God’s wisdom being primary and ours secondary in the way that the health of a person is primary and of a yoghurt is secondary.  Neither of those understandings support the significance of my belief that God knows what is in my heart right now, or is capable of understanding and answering me personally.   

Of course, Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is still better than Maimonides via negativa.  The via negativa wouldn’t let me say anything positive about God’s wisdom or knowledge at all, supporting only the claim that “God is not ignorant” for example.  Yet in practice the content supported by the doctrine of analogy is only a little more significant than that supported by the via negativa, and as has already been argued, is certainly not sufficient to do justice to the range of Christian beliefs or documents such as the Bible or the Creed.  This shows that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God.

In conclusion, while Aquinas doctrine of analogy supports us in speaking more significantly than does the via negativa, it still does not enable us to speak significantly enough about God to support Christian faith.  Being Christian demands that God is and can be said to be personal, immanent, active through the Bible and in the world today, not to mention incarnate in Jesus who was fully God as well as fully man.  Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy is far too limited to enable Christians to articulate these significant beliefs.  Better understandings of religious language from this point of view include symbol and metaphor, both of which allow a greater variety of things to be said meaningfully than does analogy.