Analogy, & symbol Myth: Eduqas A* grade notes

Eduqas
Philosophy

Intro:

Talking meaningfully about something seems to require understanding it at least to some degree.
The problem of religious language is that most Christians agree that God is totally beyond our understanding.
In that case, how can Christians meaningfully talk about God?
The three theories in this topic each attempt to explain how it’s possible to meaningfully talk about God, despite God being beyond our understanding.
This topic is really about different views on the nature of the relationship between God and humans, and what follows from that about what we could know and say about God.

Analogy claims the relationship includes participation/imago dei, so analogical language can refer imperfectly but accurately.
Symbol claims the relationship is existential/affective, so language functions to connect and transform.

AO1: Aquinas’ theory of analogy (cataphatic)

Aquinas identifies the difficulty for standard positive religious language:
Univocal language fails because we aren’t the same as God (so can’t use the same words).
Equivocal language fails because it gives words different meanings when applied to God, making them meaningless to us (since God is unknowable).
Aquinas proposes another option:
We aren’t the same as God, but nor are we totally different.
The middle ground is that we are like God (analogous to God), so our qualities are like God’s.
Analogical positive language takes something understood (e.g., our qualities) and communicates meaning through its likeness to something less understood (e.g., God’s qualities).
We understand our human qualities and can use them as analogies for God’s qualities.
Genesis supports that we are created in God’s image and likeness.
Analogy of attribution: we can meaningfully say that God has a quality of love analogous to human love.
Aquinas illustrates this: seeing healthy urine from a bull allows us to say its source (the bull) has the quality of health.
Human love is on a radically different scale to God’s omnibenevolence, but the difference is of degree, not kind.
Analogy of proportion: a being has a quality in proportion to its nature.
E.g., a virus has life, plants have life, humans have life, God has life.
God is infinite and thus has qualities infinitely.
So, we can say God has a quality of love analogous to ours, but proportionally greater.
This allows us to speak meaningfully about God while respecting that God is beyond our understanding.
Ian Ramsey’s development of analogy
Disclosure is where something is made known where previously it was hidden.
A ‘model’ is something we understand which can be used to understand something else.
We often explain things through comparisons to what is familiar.
For example, politics might be described as like chess, where chess is the model used to aid understanding.
The model is something familiar used in an analogy to explain something less understood.
A ‘qualifier’ is a word or phrase used to give deeper meaning to a model.
The qualifier is stated before the model.
Applying models and qualifiers to religious language
When talking about God, we use models drawn from human experience.
For example, human goodness can be used as a model to understand God.
In the sentence ‘God is good’, ‘good’ is the model.
However, the model must be qualified to avoid limiting God.
For example, saying God is “infinitely” good qualifies the model.
While we cannot fully understand infinite goodness, it enables meaningful language about God without reducing divine transcendence.
So, in ‘God is infinitely good’, ‘good’ is the model and ‘infinitely’ the qualifier.
Using qualified models highlights that God is beyond full human understanding.
This process leads to disclosure, resulting in religious commitment.
Ramsey’s approach accepts that language about God involves models that help us understand something beyond us, and qualifiers which show why we can’t fully understand God.
If we accept this approach we appreciate our relationship to God — this is what Ramsey calls ‘disclosure’.
We come to a greater appreciation of God’s transcendent nature — that God is beyond our understanding.

AO2: Brummer’s critique of analogy

Brummer argues analogy only manages to express negative language.
He rejects proportion as a vehicle for meaning, since God’s infinite being makes all qualities beyond our understanding.
Attribution tries to resolve this.
If God’s love is analogous to human love, we can then meaningfully say that God has love proportional to his nature.
Brummer continues his objection; attribution only tells us God is the source of our qualities, not how God has those qualities.
E.g.,: asserting that water is ‘like’ electricity only seems meaningful because we know the two things on each side of the analogy and thus in what ways they are alike (current, flow, etc).
Brummer would say we can’t do that for God because we can’t know God..

Counter

However, Aquinas doesn’t ground analogy in empirical similarity, but in metaphysical relation.
Humans possess perfections as limited participations in the unlimited perfection of God.
The very perfection (e.g., of love) we know in ourselves on the human side of the analogy, is also in God on the other side, because God is its source and cause in us.
The quality we know in ourselves is a derivative and limited form of God’s quality.
So it’s not that God has a quality which has some unknowable likeness to ours.

Evaluation

So, Brummer fails to appreciate how analogy allows us to affirm that the very perfection signified by a term is truly present in God, in an infinite and non-human mode.
E.g., If love in humans means ‘willing the good’, Aquinas says God possesses this perfection infinitely.
Even if Aquinas’ participation metaphysics failed, leaving only a bare assertion that God is “somehow” like humans, that amounts to saying something positive about God.
This would still overcome Brummer’s critique.
Either way, although analogy cannot allow us to say much, it does achieve more than the via negativa while managing to respect God’s transcendent unknowability.

AO2: Barth vs Aquinas on natural theology

Aquinas justifies natural theology by reason’s source in the ‘imago dei’.
In Genesis, this distinguishes humans from animals.
We retain moral responsibility, which comes from reason.
In fact, we can’t coherently be sinful without responsibility.
So, we are still greater than animals, must retain God’s image, and with it something of reason’s essential integrity
Aquinas concludes human reason can know God’s existence (his 5 ways), God’s natural moral law and God’s attributes through analogy.

Counter:

Karl Barth critiqued natural theology as placing a dangerous overreliance on human reason.
Sin might not totally destroy reason, but it makes reason unreliable.
He said “The finite has no capacity for the infinite”.
Our finite minds cannot grasp God’s infinite nature.
It’s dangerous to use reason to know God. Mistakes will lead to a false view of God and worshipping the wrong thing, risking idolatry.
This can lead to the worship of human things like nations, fatherlands, which Barth argued contributed to Nazism.
Barth concluded we should solely rely on faith in the Bible.

Evaluation:

Barth is perceptive about reason’s downsides, but fails to balance this against the downsides of not using reason.
E.g., blind faith and superstition, which also risk error and idolatry.
Fallen humans have no risk-free approach.
Adam and Eve warn against the arrogance of total self-reliance, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rely on our abilities at all.
Especially when they are the endurance of the divine image within us.
Aquinas shows appropriate humility in what he claims reason discovers:
Not the existence of the Christian God, merely an ‘unmoved mover’.
Not God’s eternal or divine moral law, just the natural law already within us.
Not God’s infinite nature, but some source of our qualities which holds them in an analogical and proportionally greater sense.
So, Aquinas represents an appropriate middle-ground between the extremes of avoiding reason verses overrelying on it.

AO1: Religious language as symbolic

Tillich claims that religious language is symbolic, not literal, so it does not try to say what God is.
Symbolic language connects a person’s mind to something.
Religious language connects a religious person’s mind to God, like a religious experience.
So, when someone hears ‘God be with you’, their mind feels connected to God, and that is how it is meaningful.
It is not a literal description of God, as that is impossible, but an emotional or spiritual connection.
Think of a Christian looking at a crucifix. They feel connected to God because it symbolises Jesus’ sacrifice.
Tillich says religious language works the same way. It connects the mind to God and creates a sense of closeness.
The words are not meant to describe God, but to connect our soul to God. That is their meaning.
Tillich’s theory of participation claims symbols point beyond themselves and participate in what they point to, creating a bridge for our soul to connect to that higher dimension of reality.
God is a symbol for the ‘ground of being’, and religion symbolises our ‘ultimate concern’.
As an existentialist, Tillich sees religion as about human experience, especially its most profound aspects.
Religious language is symbolic. It connects us to the mystery of existence, the ground of being, which is our ultimate concern.
Tillich’s insight is that we do not need to understand God to be connected to God.
Religious language is meaningful as symbols which participate in being itself, that is, in God.
Randall developed his own theory of symbolic language which was explicitly non-cognitive. Tillich’s theory had some seemingly cognitive elements, e.g. participation in ‘being itself’ and connecting our souls to spiritual reality.
Randall views symbols as completely subjective and thus non-cognitive.
Tillich faces the difficulty of explaining how he could know that symbolic language has the spiritual power he claims.
Randall argues his theory is more convincing because it accepts symbols involve feelings in the mind, while still capturing religious meaning in believers’ lives.
Randall compares religious language to music, art and poetry, which affect us emotionally but do not connect us to anything external.
For Randall, symbols should be understood by what they do; their “function”.
They:
Arouse emotions and motivate action
Bind communities together
Communicate experiences beyond literal language
Evoke and clarify human experience of the divine

AO2: How successfully symbols capture religious meaning

William Alston criticises Tillich for overlooking that religious language involves facts.
Religion is concerned with objective matters such as our salvation and afterlife.
Important Christian doctrines like heaven and hell have to be taken as factual truth claims, not as merely symbolic.
John Hick makes a similar point, that philosophical language about God (e.g., necessary being) is not symbolic.
We can add that Christians tend to think that when using religious language, they express beliefs about God which can be true or false. Cognitivism is a key element of religious meaning for many Christians. Tillich fails for not adequately accounting for the cognitive element of religious language.

Counter:

However, the strength of symbols compared to other approaches is their capture of the spiritual depth expressed by everyday religious language.
Tillich’s existentialism prioritizes religious experience over abstract doctrine and philosophising, which can be disconnected from genuine spirituality.
For a Christian looking at a crucifix, their spiritual feelings are often the most important thing to them.
The strength of Tillich’s theory is that it captures the most important element of religious language: the spiritual feelings it evokes, not cold factual beliefs.

Evaluation:

However, Tillich’s existentialism goes too far.
It’s a rightful corrective to the way spiritual experience was traditionally marginalised, due to fear of the Church losing its authority as the mediator between humanity and God.
However, like so many movements which are reactive, it goes too far in the other direction and fails to achieve a balanced synthesis.
What Tillich captures is only one important element.
Factual belief (e.g., in heaven and hell) is just as important to Christian believers.
In fact these beliefs entwine with spiritual feelings and orient their experience of hope, gratitude and love. These are not formless pure experiences but have intentionality, related to belief in God’s acting in history and promise of salvation in an afterlife.
Symbols thus fail to capture this cognitive element of religious language.

AO2: Issues around the subjectivity of symbols and ‘participation’

Tillich claims symbols are beyond the cognitive/non-nognitive distinction, neither factual nor emotive.
Though he also claims symbols open up levels of reality and participate in them.
This is an ontological claim about how symbols relate to reality.
To Hick this is incoherent, since ontological claims must be cognitive.
Tillich refuses explanation because he insists the divine is beyond literal description.
So Hick concludes participation is imprecise.
E.g., it is unclear how a flag participates in a nation’s power and dignity, nor how religious symbols participate in God.
Especially since if all beings participate in God, there is nothing special about religious symbols.

Counter:

Randall’s version avoids Hick’s critique by abandoning participation.
For him, religious symbols do not connect us to a transcendent reality, but regulate culture and community by evoking shared emotions, moral guidance, and sustaining identity.
By treating symbols as non cognitive, Randall avoids Hick’s demand for metaphysical explanation.
He maintains religious language can be meaningful without any objective divine reality.

Evaluation:

However, unanchoring symbols from reality collapses into theological anti realism.
Without reference beyond human practice religion makes no truth claims, contradicting most theists’ intentions.
Without transcendent reference, symbolic meaning becomes unstable, shifting with cultural changes, leaving no basis for distinguishing development from distortion.
The long-term coherence and motivational force of religion becomes harder to explain if symbols are merely cultural expressions rather than engagement with a transcendent source (E.g., Conversion, moral seriousness, and sacrifice)
Randall’s reductionism fails to capture the truth aiming, stability, and depth of religious language.
Tillich attempts to preserve truth through participation, which Hick exposes as vague.
Randall abandons truth, which only highlights how essential truth claims are to religious meaning.
The theory explains religious psychology, but fails to account for religious meaning as a whole.

AO1: Religious language as Myth

Religious language can be understood as myth: a non-cognitive form of expression that does not aim to describe factual reality, but to communicate values, meanings, and insights into the purpose of existence.
Myths are not simply false stories, but meaningful narratives that shape how humans understand themselves and their place in the world.
Different forms of myth convey these meanings in distinct ways.
Creation myths explain the origin and purpose of the world, giving humans a sense of place within a larger order.
Myths of good versus evil, such as stories of temptation or cosmic struggle, frame moral conflict and guide ethical decision-making.
Heroic myths present figures who overcome adversity, modelling virtues such as courage, sacrifice, and justice.
In this way, myths function as an effective means of transmitting religious, social, and ethical values across generations.
They also help individuals overcome fears of the unknown by providing narrative frameworks that make suffering, death, and uncertainty intelligible.
Jung argued that religious myths are archetypal, sharing recurring themes such as creation, fall, and redemption.
These reflect universal features of human life and the human psyche.
Myths therefore help individuals make sense of their existence and integrate aspects of the self, such as the shadow.
Bultmann developed a theological account of myth through his programme of demythologisation.
He argued that the New Testament expresses its message in mythological language, including miracles and the resurrection, which modern audiences struggle to accept literally.
However, these myths are not intended as historical reports, but as expressions of the spiritual impact of the kerygma, the original proclamation of the apostles.
Early Christians experienced this message as a call to repentance, forgiveness, and a transformed moral life.
The Gospel writers later expressed this experience through mythological narratives.
For example, the resurrection story symbolises the inner transformation and renewed purpose felt by those who responded to the kerygma.
Influenced by existentialism, Bultmann argued that myths communicate fundamental truths about human existence: that we are finite, not fully in control, yet open to transcendence and moral renewal.
Demythologisation seeks to uncover these meanings, enabling modern believers to encounter the same existential call.
Thus, religious myths remain a powerful form of language that communicates enduring moral insight and guides human life.

AO2: Historicism vs Bultmann on inspiration

Wright and Dodd aim for a middle ground between blind faith in the text, and Bultmann’s mythological approach.
Their mild objective view of inspiration accepts human mediation while maintaining the text still witnesses to divine reality.
Wright’s critical realist epistemology holds that knowledge is always mediated, yet still gives access to reality.
His criterion of similarity and dissimilarity identifies convergences across ideologies, helping cut through bias.
Dodd appeals to early kerygmatic tradition to support reliability.
These historical methods aim to show partial knowledge can be gained through scripture, rejecting Bultmann’s claim that scripture only reflects spiritual experience of the authors.

Counter

However, we can defend Bultmann.
Whatever credibility one might aim to give to Christianity through historical methods, must also be granted to other traditions.
They also contain historically grounded figures (E.g., the Buddha and prophet Muhammad).
So there’s no consistent or objective way to grant historical credibility to christianity, without granting it to other faiths.
Yet, this leads to a serious flaw in Wright’s approach.
Historical methods grant credibility to a set of traditions which make mutually exclusive truth claims.
In that case, when applied to sacred texts, historical methods must be unreliable as a means of establishing religious truth.
They at most show that figures existed and that people believed supernatural events surrounded them.

Evaluation

This defense of myth shows historicism is underdetermined for Wright and Dodd’s purpose.
Their textual archaeology, though impressive, can at most show that early Christians believed in the incarnation and resurrection.
Their further claim that a religion’s stories mediate divine reality requires more than evidence that people believed them, since that is true of all traditions.
Historical methods only show how such beliefs arise and are sustained within particular communities.
Religious texts are thus better understood as hagiographies or mythological: culturally shaped narratives expressing theological meaning, rather than historically reliable accounts of divine action.
So, Bultmann’s demythologising approach is more philosophically defensible.

AO2: Bultmann vs subjectivity

Wright criticises Bultmann’s uprooting of Jesus from history.
Without the historical Jesus, Christians risk believing a wishful fantasy.
Worse, they could be influenced by contemporary politics, e.g., Nazi reinterpretations emphasising Jesus’ non-Jewishness.
Which ‘deep truths’ myths convey seems subjective.
Wright concludes anchoring faith in history protects against this.
It ensures the Jesus encountered in prayer, service, and the Eucharist is recognisably the same Jesus who lived, died, and rose in the 1st century.

Counter

However, Bultmann’s approach is not simply less objective than Wright’s.
Enlightenment doubt about the Bible’s historical validity provoked two responses.
Literalism is a blind-faith illusion of objectivity, while liberal subjectivism risks relativism and unlimited interpretations.
The dilemma is that objectivity is impossible, but total subjectivity is useless.
Both Wright and Bultmann therefore forge middle grounds.
Wright is closer to objectivity, tempered by the ‘critical’ aspect of his realism.
Liberalism was initiated by Schleiermacher, who relocated religion to the safer ground of religious experience.
Bultmann is closer to this, but introduces some objectivity through Christian existentialism, where revelation is mediated by shared intersubjective experience shaped by the kerygma.

Evaluation

Ultimately, Wright’s charge of subjectivity against Bultmann is overstated.
It is constrained by the kerygma and central New Testament themes.
E.g., the resurrection is consistently linked to transformation and salvation from sin.
So, it is coherent, not arbitrary, to demythologise it as moral and spiritual renewal.
Bultmann avoids ignoring the resurrection like the liberal approach, and avoids clinging to it through blind faith.
It is instead a mythological expression of the Gospel authors’ spiritual experience, encountered in each generation through renewal.
This focus on moral transformation captures the essence of Christianity for many believers.
Wright’s insistence on grounding this in specific historical propositions appears unnecessary and alien to this core of spiritual experience, and risks exposing faith to historical critique and potential falsification.