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Can Theological Language Have Hidden Meaning?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Any reflective account of theological language acknowledges very early that words drawn from our experience with creatures have special meanings when applied to God. Because God transcends the created world, we cannot take predicates which apply to creatures and apply them to God without modification. And the more transcendent God is understood to be, the more modified will our language taken from creatures have to be when it is used in theology. A primitive theism which thinks of God simply as a very powerful person will view the difference between God and creatures as merely a matter of degree and not of kind. In such a view God transcends things in the world only in that he has a greater degree of the properties we find in creatures, so that predicates taken from creatures, ‘wise’ and ‘strong’, for example, can be applied to God in almost a straightforward way. The only change in meaning is that God is moreknowing and stronger. In a more sophisticated theism such as Judaism or Christianity, on the other hand, God' transcendence is seen not simply as a difference in degrees of properties, but as a difference in kind. The being God is is radically other than the kinds of beings we find in the created world. Indeed, it is sometimes claimed that God is not even ‘a being’, a thing which exists; rather God is ‘being itself’, ‘pure existence’. Aquinas, for instance, held that God does not haveproperties. God is absolutely simple, and so if we can talk about properties at all in talking about God, we have to say that God is identical to God' properties. God, too, differs radically from creatures in that he is not in time and space, nor is he dependent on anything else. But our language used with creatures is full of explicit or implicit references to time and space and to dependence, so that we cannot take our ordinary terms derived from our experience with spatio-temporal, dependent creatures and apply them straightforwardly to God.
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page 43 note 1 Two qualifications are required here, and will be understood in subsequent talk of words applying to God: (i) words taken from our experience with creatures must have a special sense when applied to God in true predications – we can always ‘apply’ predicates to God in their ordinary senses in false statements such as ‘God is weak’; and (2) only positive predications require special senses for their predicates – when we say ‘God is not material’, for example, we clearly mean ‘material’ in its ordinary sense.
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