Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:50:38.452Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Metaphorical Reference and the Existence of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Adam S. Miller
Affiliation:
Villanova University

Abstract

The advent of science has dislocated God from the ontological heart of the world. God no longer anchors, nor defines our shared horizons. As a result, the question of God's literal existence is no longer primary. Nonetheless, the question of God is no more avoidable than it has ever been. God continues to ceaselessly intervene in our lives in the form of the question: what do you love? To address the question of God in our world is to address the question of love and love's object. In particular, it is to address the question of love's mode of reference. Love's mode of reference, when properly understood, is metaphor, and to understand how it is possible for metaphor to refer is to have our understanding of existence and literality transformed.

Type
Editorial Essays
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Caputo, John D., On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), 6Google Scholar; italics mine.

2 Žižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 3.Google Scholar

3 Žižek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso, 1999), 142Google Scholar; italics mine.

4 Crossan, John Dominic, “Our Own Faces in Deep Wells: A Future for Historical Jesus Research,” in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, ed. Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 290.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 292.

8 Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Czerny, Robert, McLaughlin, Kathleen and Costello, John (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 221.Google Scholar

9 Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Savage, Denis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 30.Google Scholar

10 Ricoeur, , Rule of Metaphor, 229.Google Scholar

11 Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, Emerson (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 5.Google Scholar

12 Ricoeur, , Rule of Metaphor, 221.Google Scholar

13 Žižek, , Puppet and the Dwarf, 3.Google Scholar

14 Ricoeur, , Freud and Philosophy, 19.Google Scholar

15 Ricoeur, , Symbolism of Evil, 351.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 351.

17 Ricoeur, , Rule of Metaphor, 240.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 249.

19 Ibid., 291.

20 Ibid., 255.