Religious Language (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes
Other views of religious language
Introduction
Previous approaches to religious language focused on whether it is cognitive or non-cognitive. These included:
- Hare's bliks (a particular way of seeing things)
- Hick's eschatological verification (truth will be known after death)
- Wittgenstein's language games (meaning within communities)
These all moved away from the narrow picture theory of language used by Logical Positivists.
However, other thinkers start from a different position. They begin within religious experience itself and examine what happens to language when applied to God. This approach recognises that previous debates were loaded against believers because they assumed too narrow a view of how language works.
This shift in approach is significant: rather than starting with philosophical theories about language and then applying them to religious statements, these thinkers start from within religious practice and experience, examining how language actually functions in religious contexts.
The straw man problem
A straw man argument presents a weak version of a position simply to knock it down easily. The thinkers we now examine recognise that God-language differs fundamentally from literal descriptions of physical objects. The God rejected by Logical Positivists may have been little more than a superficial caricature, presented merely to be defeated in argument.
We will examine three approaches in this order:
- Aquinas on analogy
- The Via Negativa
- Tillich on symbol
Religious language as analogical: Aquinas
Understanding analogy
Key definition: An analogy explains something difficult to understand by comparing it to something more familiar within our experience.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) developed this approach to religious language. He rejected both univocal and equivocal uses of language when describing God.
Types of language use
Univocal language
- A word means exactly the same thing each time it is used
- Example: describing both a coat and coal as black uses the word univocally
Equivocal language
- A word means different things in different situations
- Example: bat can mean a cricket implement or a flying mammal
The problem with God-language
When using words like good, loving or merciful to describe both humans and God, neither univocal nor equivocal language works well:
Problems with univocal use:
- Limits God by making him too similar to ordinary things
- God presumably lacks a physical body, so cannot express love in ordinary human ways
- Reduces God to just another thing in the universe
Problems with equivocal use:
- If God is loving in a way nothing like human love, the word love becomes meaningless
- We end up saying nothing at all about God
Aquinas's solution: analogical language
Aquinas argued that we should use language analogically when describing God. The meaning of a word applied to earthly things can be extended to God, once we recognise it as analogy rather than literal description.
Aquinas proposed two forms of analogy:
1. The analogy of attribution
Core principle: God is completely different from the universe, but there is a causal relationship because God is the Creator. This causal link gives meaning to language about God.
Classic Example from Aquinas: The Bull and Its Urine
Consider these statements:
- The bull is healthy
- The bull's urine is healthy
The urine's health relates to its colour, smell and taste. The bull's health is completely different. However, they are linked because the bull produces the urine.
Applied to God:
- God is good, wise and loving
- Vanessa is good, wise and loving
- God created Vanessa, so God is causally responsible for goodness, wisdom and love in Vanessa
Important clarification: This does not mean God's goodness is simply a magnified version of human goodness. Rather, it means God has what it takes to produce these qualities in humans. God's goodness is not moral goodness as we understand it; it is whatever it means for God to be good, which we cannot fully know.
Key conclusions from analogy of attribution:
- Even though we cannot fully grasp what it means for God to be good, the statement God is good remains meaningful
- This solves the problem of anthropomorphic language - saying God is Love, Judge or King means God has what it takes to produce those attributes in persons
2. The analogy of proportionality
Core principle: When the same word describes both humans and God, its meaning is proportional to their respective natures.
Examples:
- Both humans and God can be described as powerful
- The meaning of powerful is proportional to each nature
- An ant is remarkably powerful when moving a leaf, but its power differs from human power, which differs from divine power
Baron von Hugel's Example (used by Hick):
We describe faithfulness in humans, and we recognise similar faithfulness in dogs. This faithfulness is neither completely different nor exactly the same. The language used is therefore analogical.
Analogy works in two directions:
Downwards analogy:
- From human faithfulness to canine faithfulness
- Human faithfulness involves self-conscious deliberation
- Dogs lack this quality
- So the analogy recognises real differences
Upwards analogy:
- From human faithfulness to divine faithfulness
- Human faithfulness is at best a remote approximation to God's faithfulness
- This preserves God's transcendence
Important limitation: Hick notes that analogy does not explain what God's perfect attributes actually are. It only indicates the relationship between different meanings of a word when applied to both humans and God. Analogy provides a framework for limited statements about God, not a tool for fully exploring divine nature.
Ramsey's contribution: models and qualifiers
Ian Ramsey (1915-72), philosopher and Bishop of Durham, clarified how analogical statements work.
Ramsey's views are not required by the specification but can be used to support arguments about analogy.
Key concepts:
Model: A word with straightforward meaning when applied to ordinary things, but also used to describe God
- Example: We know what creator means in ordinary contexts
- By analogy, we use creator as a model for describing God
Qualifier: A word showing how the model applies to God
- Prevents misunderstanding and univocal use
- Example: We might speak of an infinite or perfect creator
- Here, creator is the model
- Infinite or perfect are qualifiers
Ramsey's broader view of religious language:
Religious language expresses:
- Discernment: Something the religious person believes they have seen or understood about reality
- Commitment: Not simply detached or objective description
God responds with disclosure, where everyday experiences take on new depth and meaning for believers. Models and metaphors from these experiences are most appropriate for religious language.
Evaluation of analogy
Strengths:
1. Avoids limiting God
Literal, univocal language would reduce God to one thing among many. Analogy preserves God's transcendence by recognising that words applied to God mean something different from their ordinary usage, yet maintain meaningful connection to human experience.
2. Prevents anthropomorphism
Analogical language is not meant literally, which avoids making God too human-like. When believers say God is a Father or God is Love, they understand these as analogies rather than literal descriptions.
3. Connects with religious experience
Religious experiences often go beyond words. People need language to describe what they have experienced. Analogy allows words to push beyond their ordinary, limited meaning, making it possible to express transcendent experiences using familiar vocabulary.
4. Maintains cognitive meaning
Analogy uses ordinary human experience and qualities to express something (God) that transcends them. Because it is based on human experience, it remains cognitive and allows language about God to be meaningful.
This is a significant advantage over purely non-cognitive approaches: analogical language claims to say something true about reality, not merely express emotions or attitudes.
Weaknesses:
1. Requires prior knowledge of God
Both analogies only work if you already have knowledge of God:
- You cannot argue God's love is analogous to human love without knowing what God means
- Proportional relationships require knowing both things being compared
- Example problem: If God's faithfulness is infinite, then human to God cannot be remotely proportional to dog to human
This creates a circular problem: you need to know about God to use analogies, but analogies are supposed to help you speak meaningfully about God.
2. Could prove God is evil
If God has what it takes to produce goodness in humans, the same logic suggests God has what it takes to produce evil in humans. Aquinas responded that evil is not a thing itself, merely the absence of good (like darkness is absence of light). Therefore God cannot be accused of bringing about evil. However, this view of evil as privation has its own philosophical problems.
3. Works best within existing belief
Aquinas accepted that creation depends on its Creator. He accepted that some ideas about God come from special revelation (scripture). For those who already believe God exists as Creator and that God is personal and the source of qualities in the world, analogy makes perfect sense.
But those without these beliefs have no reason to say anything about God, whether analogical or univocal. Hence, analogy works best within theology, within the circle of those who already play the religious language game (to use Wittgenstein's term).
Question for reflection: Does this mean Wittgenstein's non-cognitive view was right after all? If analogy only works for those already within the religious language game, has it really solved the fundamental problem of religious language?
The Via Negativa
Kataphatic and apophatic approaches
There are two complementary approaches to religion:
Kataphatic theology
- Greek for affirmation
- Uses positive terms about God
- In prayer: using words, describing God, asking for things, praising
- In theology: using creeds and descriptions of God's qualities
- Particularly emphasised in Western Christianity
Apophatic theology
- From Greek to deny
- Denies positive descriptions of God
- The Via Negativa: the negative way by way of denial
- In prayer: sitting in silence, opening the mind without words, allowing God's presence to infuse the experience
- In theology: emphasising that God or Ultimate Reality is beyond all description
- Seen in Eastern Orthodox religion, some branches of Hinduism and Buddhism
The mystical tradition
Mystics have generally taken the apophatic way. Wittgenstein, interested in mysticism, ended his Tractatus with a perfect definition of the apophatic approach:
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.
This connects to the work of Otto and Stace on religious experience. They saw God as utterly transcendent and ineffable. God is so beyond ordinary language that nothing can be said about him in any positive or literal way without diminishing him.
Using Ian Ramsey's terminology, the qualifiers needed when speaking about God totally overwhelm the content of the models. God is somehow known, yet remains beyond knowledge. This is the Via Negativa.
Core principle of Via Negativa: The most we can say is what God is not. We deny God the sorts of qualities and limitations that apply to other beings.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Historical note: The name Pseudo refers to the fact that this unknown writer from the early sixth century CE presented his work as coming from Dionysius the Areopagite, who (in Acts 17:34) was converted by Saint Paul and became the first bishop of Athens. The sixth-century writer hoped to show his views aligned with the Early Church.
Philosophical background: Pseudo-Dionysius was a Neo-Platonist, deeply influenced by Plato's distinction between:
- The eternal, unchanging, perfect realm of the Forms
- The limited and changing material things in this world
Development of Via Negativa: He developed this approach to:
- Emphasise God's transcendence
- Separate God from any literal description that could limit him
- Separate God from identification with changeable things in this world
As a mystic, he believed one could experience God personally in a way beyond language.
Key claim: God is nameless, yet has the names of everything that is.
This follows from:
- The broad sense of God not just as creator (requiring only a deistic view of external God) but as involved creatively within everything
- The mystical sense of being at one with God
Language that uses words to describe the bits and pieces of our world cannot embrace this sense of an indwelling and omnipresent God.
Maimonides (c.1135-1204)
A Jewish philosopher, astronomer and physician, born in Cordova (present-day Spain). Known as the Great Eagle for his expertise in the Jewish Oral Torah. He apparently despised poetry as linguistic invention.
Key argument: Maimonides insisted that God was not comparable to anything else. To say that God is the most powerful being means God's power can be compared with human power, which reduces God to a thing that can be measured against everything else.
He therefore adopted negative theology, which describes God by accumulating negatives, such as:
- God is not corporeal
- God does not exist in space
Maimonides' Ship Analogy:
Consider someone learning what a ship is through negative attributes:
- A person knows a ship exists but not what the name applies to
- They learn it is not an accident
- Not a mineral
- Not a plant
- Not a body whose parts are joined by nature
- Not a flat object like boards or doors
- Not a sphere
- Not pointed
- Not round shaped
- Not solid
By the tenth negation, the person has almost arrived at the correct notion of a ship through negative attributes.
Application to God: Similarly, we come nearer to knowledge and comprehension of God through negative attributes. Maimonides claims that those who affirm positive attributes of God unconsciously lose their belief in God because they limit him.
Evaluation of the Via Negativa
Strengths:
1. Avoids problems of positive language
If God is the Creator and source of all things, it makes sense that God cannot himself be a thing. The Via Negativa avoids seeing God as merely one thing over and against other things.
2. Avoids anthropomorphism
Focus on God's transcendence prevents making God too human-like. By saying only what God is not, believers avoid the temptation to imagine God as having human characteristics, emotions, or limitations.
3. Supported by mystical tradition
Mystics like Otto and Stace claim God is ineffable, beyond sense experience. Apophatic forms of meditation support this. Mystical experiences are said to be indescribable, which aligns perfectly with the Via Negativa's approach to language.
Weaknesses:
1. Fails to give positive understanding
Brian Davies argues that saying only what something is not gives no indication of what it actually is. If you can only say what God is not, you cannot understand him at all.
Example: If someone tells you there is something in their room but rejects every suggestion of what it is, you gain no idea what is actually there.
Regarding Maimonides' ship example: Someone with all those negations could equally be thinking of a wardrobe.
2. Amounts to definition of nothing (Flew's criticism)
Recall Flew's Parable of the Gardener. The believer kept qualifying statements: the gardener is invisible, inaudible, intangible and incorporeal. This is the language of Via Negativa. Flew complained that defining God this way amounts to defining nothing. The concept of God dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
This criticism highlights the tension at the heart of the Via Negativa: in trying to preserve God's transcendence by removing all positive attributes, it risks making the concept of God completely empty and meaningless.
3. Problems with mystical support
If a mystic has an experience of God but cannot describe it, how can we tell whether it was truly an experience of God or simply a brain-produced experience? The ineffability of mystical experiences, rather than supporting the Via Negativa, might actually undermine its reliability.
4. Impractical for worship
Is it possible to worship a God described entirely in negative ways: not finite, not visible, not tangible, not limited, not having parts and passions? Most believers want to say positive things about God. They need appropriate ways to qualify language while remaining cognitive and avoiding literalism.
Religious language as symbolic: Tillich
Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
A German Christian existentialist theologian. Tillich was brought up Protestant, ordained, and became a military chaplain to German forces in World War One. The war experience led him to question traditional Lutheran theology. He taught philosophy in German universities before being expelled by the Nazis and escaping to the United States.
Key theological contributions:
- His theology matched up existential questions people ask about life and meaning with symbols offered in Christian language and doctrine
- Particularly known for arguing that God is Being-itself rather than a separate being
- Religion is about one's ultimate concern: that which ultimately gives life value and meaning
The problem Tillich addresses
We have seen that debates about cognitive or non-cognitive religious language, analogical or equivocal language, are difficult to resolve:
- For Aquinas's analogy to work, you must believe God exists and that terms can be applied analogically to God
- The Via Negativa seems to end with being able to say nothing cognitive about God at all
Tillich's view of religious symbol addresses both problems.
Main features of symbols according to Tillich
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Symbols point to a reality beyond themselves
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They participate in the power to which they point
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They open up levels of reality which would otherwise be closed to us
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They simultaneously open up levels of the soul which correspond to those realities
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Symbols cannot be produced intentionally; they grow from the human unconscious
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Symbols are produced and die within a cultural context
- Example: Religious systems of Ancient Greece and Rome died when their pantheon of gods lost resonance and meaning
Explaining these features
Features 1 and 2: Signs versus symbols
From Tillich's Systematic Theology:
Sign:
- A conventional way of using an image or word to point to something other than itself
- Example: Road signs
- We learn the Highway Code to know what signs mean
- Some picture what they signify (slippery road, older people crossing)
- Others are abstract (no entry sign)
- Key point: They are conventional and can be replaced
Symbol:
- Points beyond itself, like a sign
- But also participates in the power of that to which it points
- Example: A flag is a sign of the country it represents
- At the same time, it participates in the power and dignity of that country
This distinction is crucial to understanding Tillich: symbols are not arbitrary or replaceable like signs. They have a deeper connection to what they represent because they participate in its reality.
Features 3 and 4: Symbols and religious experience
To discover the true nature of religion, we must start from religious experience. This kind of experience can only be expressed by symbolic language.
Symbols open up levels of reality otherwise closed to us. Tillich explains this by analogy with the arts (poetry, art, music).
Example: Wagner's Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
- A musical masterpiece constructed over 26 years
- Combination of mythological and poetical themes
- When Valkyrie Brünnhilde loses immortality to experience passion and death with Siegfried, the Ring Cycle creates its own level of reality through musical, poetical and artistic symbolism
- Does so uniquely
- Through music and art of this stature, the soul finds new perspectives on life
Application to religion:
- Religious symbols fulfil their function uniquely
- Nothing else can fulfil that function
- They open up a level of reality not otherwise opened up at all
Influence of Rudolf Otto: Tillich was influenced by Otto's work on religious experience. Otto argued that the essence of religion is where the soul experiences the numinous and the Holy. Numinous feelings are not just more intense versions of normal feelings: they are sui generis (unique, in a class of their own). They are a special faculty in our minds that recognises the holy and responds to it.
Two essential features of God
According to Tillich, the God that appears through religious experience or religious symbol has two essential features:
1. God is Being-itself rather than a being
- An experience of God is not an experience of something that just happens to be there
- Not an experience of one object among others
- Rather, an experience of life itself, of being or existence itself
- An experience which gives meaning to everything else
2. God is our ultimate concern
- For the religious believer, God demands total attention and commitment
- Covers all other aspects of life
- This sense of God as the most important concern is seen in the nature of religious experience
Crucial implications for religious language
1. The only literal statement: God is Being-itself
- We cannot use literal language to describe Being-itself
- Asking What is Being-itself? is not a question about a particular being
- It examines the question of what it means to be, to exist
2. Symbols are self-transcending
- A symbol means something in itself
- But also points beyond itself to some higher or greater reality
- Example: Seeing a new-born baby – the significance goes beyond the physical thing you see
- Example: For those consuming bread and wine in Holy Communion, the significance can transcend the physical experience of eating and drinking
- This self-transcending quality of life is key to Tillich's understanding
- Symbolic language is the only language that can express this self-transcending quality
3. God is not a separate being
- God does not exist as a being among others
- God is Being-itself
4. Religious language must reflect religious experience
- God is the name for what a religious person encounters in a way that is personal and demanding
- Not casual or detached
- If we use Cosmological Argument language to prove God's existence, this is NOT religious language – it is merely about cosmology
- For something to be religious, it must reflect religious experience or religious practice
Example: God is love
The radical nature of religious symbol can be illustrated through the claim God is love.
Analyzing "God is love":
Traditional cognitive approach problems:
- If this gives information about a deity in a supernatural realm, it falls under Logical Positivist criticism
- No direct evidence for such a cognitive claim
Non-cognitive approach problems:
- "God is love" means little more than a personal, subjective decision to live lovingly
- Or to take love as primary motivation
Problems with defining God:
- Even if we define what we mean by God, we face the problem of how an eternal, omnipresent God can be described using words whose meaning comes from ordinary, limited objects
Tillich's symbolic solution:
- Instead of starting with a separate being called God and a known experience called love, put them together
- In the experience of love, we encounter a reality that transcends our particular circumstances
- God becomes a name we give to the reality revealed by love
- Symbolic language conveys information about what is experienced
- Yet it does not refer to experience of a separate entity called God
- Reflects the theological claim that God is everywhere
- As St Paul stated: In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28)
- The religious symbol is a direct consequence of this conviction about God and the nature of religious experience
- An ordinary word becomes a symbol when it offers insight into the nature of reality itself
- This is what God-language is about, not doubtful claims about supernatural beings
Evaluation of symbolic language
Strengths:
1. Connects to everyday experience
Symbolic language relates religious ideas to ordinary experiences, such as love. This makes religion accessible and relevant to people's actual lives rather than abstract theological speculation.
2. Simplifies what we need to say about God
Tillich allows only one literal statement: God is Being-itself. God is not a being existing within this universe or transcendent realm. Therefore, there is no need to try saying something meaningful about such a being through analogy or Via Negativa.
This is a radical simplification: it removes the entire problem of how to speak literally about a transcendent being by denying that God is a being at all.
3. Reflects religious experience
The approach is based on what is known through religious experience. It gains insight into central life issues: guilt, sin, alienation, love, redemption, salvation, judgement, Kingdom of God. These are understood existentially: they tell us about the meaning of our lives.
Weaknesses:
1. Unclear meaning of participation (Hick's criticism)
Hick rejects Tillich's view that symbols participate in the reality to which they point. He complains Tillich does not clarify what this means.
Example: For the symbolic statement "God is good":
- Is the symbol the proposition "God is good" or the concept "the goodness of God"?
- Does this symbol participate in Being-itself in the same sense a flag participates in a nation's power and dignity?
- What precisely is this sense?
- Everything that exists participates in Being-itself
- What is the difference between how symbols participate and how everything else participates?
2. Symbols do not all arise from the unconscious (Hick's criticism)
Hick disputes Tillich's view that symbols arise from the unconscious mind. He takes the complex theological statement: God is not dependent for his existence upon any reality other than himself. He asks: Is it really plausible to say this has arisen from the unconscious, whether individual or collective?
This is a valid point: Many important things said about God (Cosmological and Design Arguments) arise from conscious brains of philosophers and theologians, not from unconscious symbolic development.
3. Incompatible with many Christian views
Many Christians do not share Tillich's view of God as Being-itself. For Tillich, God as a separate being does not exist. What we call God is Being-itself: the ground upon which all beings exist.
This does not sit well with:
- Christians who see God as both a separate, transcendent being and the ground of existence
- Deists who see God as Creator who made the universe then left it to follow its laws
- Process theologians who see God-and-the-universe existing panentheistically
Key Points to Remember:
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Aquinas's analogy proposes that religious language works analogically rather than univocally or equivocally. The analogy of attribution relies on God's causal relationship with creation. The analogy of proportionality suggests meaning is proportional to respective natures. Strengths include avoiding literalism while maintaining cognitive meaning. Weaknesses include requiring prior knowledge of God.
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The Via Negativa takes an apophatic approach, saying only what God is not rather than what God is. Pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides developed this to preserve God's transcendence. Strengths include avoiding anthropomorphism and limiting God. Weaknesses include failing to give positive understanding and being impractical for worship.
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Tillich's symbolic language argues that all religious language except God is Being-itself is symbolic. Symbols point beyond themselves, participate in what they represent, and open up levels of reality and soul. God is our ultimate concern. Strengths include connecting to everyday experience and being based on religious experience. Weaknesses include unclear meaning of participation and incompatibility with some Christian views.
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Key contrast: These three approaches move beyond simple cognitive/non-cognitive debates by starting from within religious experience itself and examining how language functions when applied to the divine.
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Exam tip: When evaluating these approaches, consider whether they successfully balance making meaningful statements about God whilst preserving God's transcendence. Compare and contrast their different solutions to the same fundamental problem.