Religious Language

After last weekend’s preparation weekend for this year’s camp, I think that writing up some thoughts that I have had over the past few months, some of which came up in debate on the Friday night.

My main concern is with the nature of religious language and conceptuality, posing the age-old question of what it means to speak about God. Back to Aquinas, God is not a ‘thing’ in the universe like other ‘things’ – God is of a different order altogether. Further to this, the centrality that God is not just a big version of myself – most usually called anthropomorphism, the projection of human being onto the divine – is deeply significant. Given that this is the case, what does it mean to use language and conceptuality ‘about’ God, who is beyond linguistic description or conceptual analysis?

− What does it mean to talk about God as a person, given that he is not a person?
− What does it mean to talk about God saying something, or doing something, given that God has no mouth to speak, or hands to do something with?

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Firstly, an example of how not to do it is, I think, illuminating: concepts of God as a person, or as an active agent who does things in the way that you or I do things remain of profound help and significance – but to become attached to any of these elements in their own right, as ‘defining’ or ‘fundamental’ elements of describing God’s Being, is to miss the subtlety of their scope. So, lots of Christians became irate when John Robinson (in a 1963 book, ‘Honest to God’) popularised the work of Paul Tillich, which stated that God was not a person who is ‘out there’ in the ‘real’ world, but the very ground of Being itself, for whom these concepts miss the point.

If, then, God is not a person as we are persons, and does not converse with people in the same way as humans do, because God is not a human – even a super-powerful human; what about all the stories in the Bible that seem to present God as speaking to people, walking around and all the rest?

Here, I think, my recent comments on the importance of genre in reading Scripture come into their own: given that many of the biblical writers are unconcerned with ‘historical’ accounts, but instead tell stories – rather like Christ did – this language becomes easier to understand: the writers are placing concepts about God into familiar language, in order that elements of the God who is beyond language and conceptuality be, in some sense, made known through this meaningful speech about God. So, telling stories and acknowledging both that they are stories, and also that the frames of reference in which they operate are not descriptions of the nature of divine Being, but attempts to make sense of and comprehend the incomprehensible. As long as people are conscious that this is what religious language is doing, then I have no problem; but when this religious language becomes made equivalent with the Being of God Godself – ie, realizing (that is, making real) the language, without realising its real significance – do the overly defensive elements of rhetorical defence come into play.