2.1 Theological language in scripture
Some scriptural passages indicate a privileged relationship between God and language. For example, scripture compares God’s creative activity to speech in Genesis 1, when on each day of creation, God says ‘let X be’, and it was (see Creation in the Old Testament). Another such passage is Exod 3:14, when God reveals to Moses God’s very name, variously translated ‘I am Who am’, or ‘I will be Who I will be’ (Heb. אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה [’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye]; Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν [egō eimi ho ōn]; Latin ego sum qui sum). Later philosophers and theologians would take this name as proof for the intimate relationship between theology and metaphysics, the philosophy of being. In the New Testament, John 1 professes Jesus Christ as the ‘Word’ (Greek Λόγος [Logos]; Latin Verbum) who in the beginning was with God, who is God, and who took flesh and dwelt (literally, ‘pitched his tent’) among human beings. Trinitarian theology, especially in the wake of Augustine, often sees ‘Word’ as a peculiarly fitting name for the second person of the Trinity. Likewise, the etymology of the title of the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, relates to God’s breath (Heb.רוּחַ [ruah]; Greek πνεῦμα [pneuma]; Latin spiritus), implying a connection to God’s Word.
Scripture also describes humanity’s use of language in its diversity. One such passage is Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. Humanity seeks to build a tower reaching up to the heavens. Upon seeing this, God confuses their language so that they are unable to communicate with each other, and humanity is scattered across the whole earth. Another such passage is the recounting of Pentecost in Acts 2. Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, and ten days after his ascension into heaven, the Holy Spirit is poured upon the apostles, hidden in an upper room, at which time they began speaking in tongues. A culturally and linguistically diverse crowd is gathered outside, and each member of the crowd begins to hear the apostles preaching in their own language. Both these passages raise the question of what to make of the variety of human languages, and whether this variety of languages impedes – or even facilitates – speech about God.
Scripture is clear that we cannot know God in fullness; thus, language about God cannot be totally adequate to who God is. While we are commanded to ‘seek the Lord while he may be found’ (Isa 55:6), we are also told that ‘no one has ever seen God’ (John 1:18). Even when the scriptures discuss Moses’ ability to see God, he must see God’s back, covered by God’s hand (Exod 33:18–23). Likewise, there are elements of God’s actions and plans that remain unknown, both God’s ‘thoughts’ and ‘ways’ (Isa 55:8), and ‘what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor 2:9). There is a specific problem associated with speaking about God. Paul makes this clear in Romans 8: when we cry ‘Abba, Father’, it is the Spirit of God that bears witness (Rom 8:15–16). It is not that we could not call God ‘Father’ before the Son’s incarnate coming, since God is named ‘Father’ several times in the Old Testament (see, for example: Isa 63:16; 64:8; Jer 3:19; Mal 2:10). Perhaps even before Christ’s coming, God’s Spirit was at work cultivating our language about God, language we could not have spoken otherwise.
The problem runs deeper: there are passages which suggest that everyday creaturely predications such as ‘good’ (Mark 10:18; Luke 18:19) or ‘father’ (Eph 3:14–15) are rooted in God, suggesting that creatures can only be called ‘good’ or ‘father’ in relation to divine perfections. Whereas Ephesians 3 focuses on the similarity between God and creatures, Mark 10 and Luke 18 emphasize the difference. In any case, we can only use certain language about creatures because of a way those creatures relate to God. It is not only that God is unspeakable for us, but even creatures – even everyday words like ‘good’ and ‘father’. The scriptures attest that using language about God appropriately, and even speaking about creatures rightly, is complicated.
A particularly knotty instance of this complexity is interpreting scriptural imagery used for God. To consider one example, although we are told that God is a spirit (John 4:24; Col 1:15), invisible (1 Tim 1:17) and without flesh and bone (Luke 24:39), there are numerous references to parts of God’s body (see Stavrakopoulou 2021 for a controversial interpretation): God’s face (Gen 32:30; Num 6:24–26; Ps 27:8; Ezek 39:29; Matt 18:10; 1 Pet 3:12), eyes (Job 34:21; Ps 11:4; Prov 15:3; 1 Pet 3:12), ears (2 Sam 22:7; Ps 34:15; Isa 59:1; Neh 1:11; 1 Pet 3:12), hands and arms (Exod 33:22; 1 Chr 29:12; Ps 136:12; Job 12:10; Isa 41:10; 1 Pet 5:6), feet (Exod 24:9–12; Matt 5:35; Eph 1:22), back (Exod 33:23), and others; a Hebrew phrase denoting God’s wrath describes a burning nose (see Exod 4:14; 1 Sam 17:28; Ps 18:8; Isa 65:5). Many Christians attempted (and attempt still) to make sense of this divergence by pointing to the difficulty with which we must interpret all theological language. What can seem an obscure and detached question is rooted in everyday scriptural interpretation.
2.2 Theological language in patristic theology
Origen of Alexandria (d. 253) interpreted seemingly contradictory scriptural statements – such as claim claims that ‘God is not as man, that he may be deceived’ (Num 23:19), and ‘[t]he Lord your God has taught you as a man teaches his son’ (Deut 8:5) – by concluding that when scripture speaks of theology, God in himself, it describes God as not like a man; but when scripture speaks of ‘economy’, God’s relation to creation, it speaks of God like a man:
[J]ust as we, if we are talking with a two-year-old child, speak inarticulately because of the child – for it is impossible, if we observe what is fitting for the age of a full-grown man, and when talking to children, to understand the children without condescending [synkatabasis] to their mode of speech – something of this sort also seems to me the case with God whenever he manages the race of men and especially those still infants. (Homilies on Jeremiah 18.6.3; Origen 1998: 199)
Origen adopted allegorical or typological exegesis to uncover hidden meanings of scripture, following Jewish exegetes such as Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE). For Origen, allegorical reading was as much about concealing as revealing, since ‘when [Christ] was sent into the world he did not merely make himself known; he also concealed himself’ (Against Celsus 2.67; Origen 1953: 118). The challenge of navigating mystery and communication in theological language gives rise to the spiritual senses of scripture.
Debates around theological language quickly expanded beyond pure exegesis. The ‘Arian Controversy’ began when Arius (d. 336) was condemned by his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, for teaching that the Son was begotten/created from the Father, and that before he was begotten/created, he did not exist. Arius had a fiercely apophatic understanding of God, arguing that God can only be revealed to us by the action of the Son, although the Son was not God in a full sense. The First Council of Nicaea (325) condemned Arius, declaring that the Son was begotten while remaining homoousios tō Patri – consubstantial (one in substance) with the Father. How homoousios was to be understood remained controversial. In his Epistula ad Caesarienses (letter to his diocese in Caesarea, 326), the Arius-sympathetic Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) interprets homoousios in a primarily negative fashion to mean that the Son was unlike any creature, though he affirms that the Son is ‘from the Father’ and ‘similar to the Father alone’. Alexander’s successor Athanasius (d. 373) understands homoousios as positively declaring oneness of ousia between Father and Son. As Athanasius insists in De decretis (On Decrees, c. 353), homoousios must mean more than the Son being unlike any creature, though it entails this. Athanasius insists that homoousios affirmatively (albeit, always mysteriously) tells us something about God as Trinity and the Son’s divinity.
Disputes about the nature of theological language continued after the Council of Nicaea. Aëtius of Antioch (fl. c. 350) and Eunomius of Cyzicus (d. c. 393) clashed with the ‘Cappadocian Fathers’ – Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390), Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 394), and Basil of Caesarea (330–378) – over the degree to which words could adequately characterize the divine essence. The former group insisted that the divine nature is essentially agennetos (unbegotten); thus, they rejected the homoousios, since the Son was begotten of the Father. Although Aëtius and Eunomius were often identified as neo-Arians because of their attribution of qualified divinity (if any) to the Son, they differed in that while Arius clung to apophaticism, Aëtius and Eunomius rejected it, declaring that unless Christians had a positive understanding of the divine nature as agennetos, they did not know God at all.
The Cappadocian Fathers developed their theological visions explicitly to counter Eunomius. Gregory of Nazianzus’ Theological Orations 27–32 marshal a variety of arguments, including charging Eunomius with reading scripture too much through the lens of pagan philosophy (see Beeley 2010). Gregory of Nyssa argues that the divine essence is ‘beyond the circumscription of names’ (Against Eunomius 2.587) and that all names or epinoiai (conceptualizations) of God describe not the divine essence, but God’s activities or relations to creatures (Letter to Ablabius; see Cross 2012; Radde-Gallwitz 2009; 2019). In his Against Eunomius, Basil denies not only that Eunomius’ agennetos names the divine essence, but further that all epinoiai fail to grasp the essences of things (see DelCogliano 2010). In the face of Eunomius’ novel claim to be able to describe the divine essence as it is in itself, all three Cappadocians defended apophatic accounts of theological language.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) discussed theological language in many writings, employing the distinction between ‘sign’ (signum), that which signifies, and ‘thing’ (res), that which the sign signifies (see On the Teacher; On Christian Doctrine). God – the ultimate res – is beyond human speech, understanding, or any other signum. Thus, Augustine consistently emphasizes the inadequacy of speech about God and our inability even to say what we mean (On Christian Doctrine I.6; Confessions I.1). He insists, in true apophatic fashion: ‘if you understand it, it is not God’ (Sermons 117.3.5). However, Augustine has more to say about language than its failure: God ‘has sanctioned the homage of the human voice, and chosen that we should derive pleasure from our words in praise of him’ (On Christian Teaching I.6; 1997a: 11), and because God is everywhere, God is in us and can be present to our speech (Confessions I.2.2–5.6). In On the Trinity, Augustine even sees in human words a vestigium trinitatis (trace of the Trinity) proper to the Son:
[J]ust as [sicut] our word in some way becomes a bodily sound [vox] by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes a sound and is not changed into a sound, so the Word of God indeed becomes flesh, but far be it from us that it should be changed into flesh. (On the Trinity 15.11.20; Augustine of Hippo 2002: 187; see Morgan 2010)
For Augustine, speech about God is never simply ‘about’ God as an object but is a space where God might be present to us despite our language’s failure.
The most commonly cited thinker on apophatic theology is the (possibly) fifth- or sixth-century writer who took the name of Dionysius (or Denys) the Areopagite, the Athenian judge whom Paul brought to Christianity when he preached on the ‘unknown god’ in Acts 17. In On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, Dionysius develops a complex understanding of theological language as involving the negation of cataphatic ascriptions, according to a Christian variation of the Neoplatonic triplex via (threefold way) of affirmation, negation, and supereminence:
Since it is the Cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it [kataphaskein] all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and, more appropriately, we should negate [apophaskein] all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being. Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations [kataphaseis], but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion [thesis]. (The Mystical Theology 1000B; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 1987: 136)
Dionysius clarifies that when it comes to the Cause, ‘we make affirmations and denials of what is next to it, but neither affirm nor deny anything of it’ (The Mystical Theology 1048B). The goal of apophasis is spiritual ascent by which the mind leaves creaturely things – even the self (Stang 2012) – to dwell with God. For Dionysius, the intellectual practice of naming and negating is only part of this process, which involves harmony with the hierarchies of created things through liturgy and prayer (Louth 2002).
2.3 Theological language in medieval and Reformation theology
2.3.1 Theological language in medieval scholasticism
Drawing on Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Boëthius (d. 524), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) argued that theological predicates are neither univocal (having the same meaning) nor equivocal (having different meaning), but ‘analogous’: there is similarity within difference. Aquinas rejects the apophaticism of the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), who understands predications about God either as negation or as speech about God’s actions – Maimonides interprets God-talk equivocally, since ‘goodness’ describes only God’s status as not evil and/or as cause of good effects, rather than God in himself. For Aquinas, meanings cannot be univocal because God and creatures do not fall under a common genus; there is no shared part or definition between God and creatures. Analogy serves as a mean between univocity and equivocity. God’s difference from creatures motivates this conclusion: whereas creatures are complex – we are composed of various parts, both physical and nonphysical – God is simple; even his essence is identical to his existence. In creatures, the predicate ‘circumscribes and comprehends the thing that is signified’, whereas in God, the divine essence ‘exceeds the signification of the name’ (Summa Theologica I.13.5).
While denying that we have positive knowledge of God’s essence and rejecting any real relation between God and creatures, Aquinas adopts Dionysius’ triplex via to predicate creaturely perfections that do not require a creaturely mode of signification – ‘goodness’, ‘wisdom’, ‘being’, etc. – of God. However, we must negate every creaturely condition or limitation in our normal uses of these words, since God’s goodness and wisdom are not limited by his mode of being; Aquinas uses the language of predicating the res significatum (thing signified) with a different modus significandi (mode of signification) (Scriptum super Sententiis 1.9; Summa Theologica I.13). Some terms, such as ‘stone’ or ‘lion’, cannot be applied to God except metaphorically, because their creaturely conditions are baked into the term itself. As for the pure perfections, which admit of a modus significandi appropriate to divine simplicity, God’s perfections are more perfect than those of creatures. Aquinas is often described as finding in analogy a middle ground between cataphaticism and apophaticism, mediating between positive and negative theology (Rocca 2004).
John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) objected – not against Aquinas, but Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) – that theological language must be univocal. Without a univocal conception of being, Duns Scotus argues that there would be no valid arguments about God, since equivocation through a middle term produces an invalid argument. The following argument is clearly invalid, since the meaning of ‘healthy’ changes across the premises:
- Premise 1: All healthy things are alive (healthy meaning flourishing or well-functioning).
- Premise 2: Exercise is healthy (healthy meaning ‘healthful’ or health-causing).
- Conclusion: Exercise is alive.
Owing to the nature of theological and metaphysical language, if no valid arguments could be formed in theology or metaphysics, theological and metaphysical language would be nonsensical (see Williams 2005). Unlike Aquinas, Duns Scotus provides exact criteria of univocity:
- to affirm and deny a univocally predicated term of one and the same thing would be a contradiction; and
- a univocally predicated term has sufficient unity to serve as the middle term of a syllogism, so that wherever two extremes are united by a middle term that is one in this way, we may conclude to the union of the two extremes among themselves (Ordinatio I.3.1.2.26; see Cross 1999: 37).
Duns Scotus thinks that univocity is necessary for the preservation of theology as a science, and that even theologians who reject it must implicitly hold a univocal theory of theological language.
Duns Scotus’ notion of univocity is non-generic and fundamentally logical; a univocal term does not pick out a shared property and can cross the God–creature distinction without placing the two under a common genus. This is because Duns Scotus’ notion of univocity is at the level of concepts, not things. For this reason, his insistence on univocity does not mean that he rejects all forms of analogy. Duns Scotus thinks that God exists differently than creatures: ‘infinite being’ rather than ‘finite being’. However, ‘being’ must have a core of meaning that is shared in both cases. The difference between divine and creaturely being is thus really a difference in kind which can be conceptually modelled as a difference in degree. Duns Scotus does not see his univocal semantics as impinging upon the absolute, qualitative difference between God and creatures. He insists that he holds a theory of analogy at the level of things (see Ordinatio I.3.1.3.163), albeit one which requires univocity at the level of meanings.
Latter-day Thomists such as Dominic of Flanders (1425–1479) and Thomas de Vio Cajetan (1469–1534) (see D'Ettore 2020), Scotists such as Petrus Thomae (d. before 1340) and Bartolomeo Mastri (1602–1673) (see Smith 2019), and others who adopted mixed or alternative accounts – most prominently Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) (see Sálas 2015) – continued to discuss analogy and univocity to explain theological language.
2.3.2 Theological language and the Reformation
Martin Luther (1483–1546) rejected Aristotle’s work in metaphysics and ethics, but commended his logic, rhetoric, and poetics (Weimarer Ausgabe [WA] 6.458.26–28; Luthers Werke [LW] 44.201–202), saying that ‘among all the sciences of human invention, chiefly the most useful for spreading theology is grammar’ (WA 6.29.7–8). For Luther, theological language begins with God’s address to us. Luther insists that this addressed verbum externum (external word) must be received by the believer, to whom the Spirit speaks a verbum internum (internal word) or testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti (internal testimony of the Holy Spirit). Analysing scripture’s text is a necessary step, but insufficient. For Luther, problems around theological language are not solved by sorting through philosophical and semantic puzzles – though Luther’s emphasis on grammar shows that these considerations remain important – but are resolved by the transformation of the heart. This is because, as Johannes von Lüpke puts it:
While human speech is always ‘only referential or as a sign’ (WA 10.1.1.188.10), which refers to the reality at its base and distinguishes itself as a deficient mode of the presentation or appearance of the speaker himself, the divine Word is characterized by the speaker’s very presence. It is ‘not a mere wind or echo, but it brings with it the entire essence of the divine nature’ (WA 10.1.1.186.15–16). (von Lüpke 2014: 151)
Theology is a grammar of scripture, analysing the rules and principles which offer the bounds for speech to be accountable to God’s self-disclosure. Luther’s account of theological language is grounded in a Deus verbosus (speaking God; WA 39.2.194–195; LW 34.316) who reveals himself by his Word: in the verbum externum of the scriptures, in the testimonium internum of the Holy Spirit, and preeminently in the Word of God par excellence, the person of Jesus Christ.
Like Luther, John Calvin (1509–1564) insisted, in his theology of scripture, that Word and Spirit always go together. Calvin, like Luther, was sceptical of philosophy and any natural ability to come to know God – or anything else – after the fall. Calvin finds certain knowledge and an antidote to scepticism in ‘a perfect conviction that [God] is scripture’s author’ (Institutes of the Christian Religion I.7). This conviction can only be given by God, since God alone can offer sufficient testimony of God’s own words. Thus, only the illumination of the Spirit grants conviction of scriptural authenticity and authority. For Calvin, the inner testimony of the Spirit short-circuits concerns about the meaning of scriptural language. The core meaning of scripture is the ‘natural and obvious meaning’ (Commentary on Galatians 4:22), though in the same passage, Calvin advocates for certain kinds of christological typology. Nor does Calvin reject a learned study of the scriptural text in favour of any interpretation being as good as any other. Calvin’s purpose was not to take scripture solely at face value, but only to let the natural and obvious meaning secure against fanciful over-allegorizing or ‘clever’ eisegesis. On the question of theological language generally, then, Calvin pairs his stark rejection of any ‘natural language’ about God with a confidence in interpreting scripture by faith and the illumination of the Spirit.
2.3.3 Theological language and mysticism
A distinctive feature of medieval and early modern Christianity is attention to mysticism. Christina van Dyke suggests that Western mysticism takes two general forms:
the apophatic tradition (which holds that the ultimate stage of human existence is a selfless and unknowing merging with the infinite) and the affective tradition (which focuses on the way in which mystical union can be experienced and expressed in emotional, physical, and sensory terms). (van Dyke 2010: 722)
Varying strategies express language’s inability to do God justice. One can resist any affirmation, along the lines of Meister Eckhart’s (c. 1260–c. 1320) claim that God
is as high above being as the highest angel is above a gnat. I would be speaking as incorrectly in calling God a being as if I called the sun pale or black. God is neither this nor that. (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 9)
One can also multiply affirmations to the point of apparent ‘contradiction’, such as Nicholas of Cusa’s (1401–1461) argument in On Learned Ignorance (1440) that the least imperfect name for God is the coincidentia oppositorum – coincidence of opposites. These strategies need not oppose each other; indeed, thinkers drawing on Eckhart (such as Lossky 2024; Williams 2014) explain how God might be both omninominabile (all-nameable) and innominabile (unnameable).
Although ‘religious experience’ can seem a private affair, mystics put their experience to words. As Amy Hollywood (1995: 2) says of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1282/1294), words equally applicable to other mystics: ‘[w]riting is not only an approved activity […] but one demanded by the divine. She must write; she cannot be silent about the wonders with which love occupies her’ (original emphasis). Gertrude the Great (1256–1302), when offered the choice between an inexpressible union with Christ or a conversation with God which she could communicate to others, chose the latter (Legatus Memorialis Abundantiae Divinae Pietatis 4.2). When mystics wrote, it was seldom in scholastic terms. Hadewijch of Brabant (thirteenth century) and Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) employed the language of courtly love to express their very different experiences. Some such writings, such as Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098–1179) Scivias, are remarkably learned, and Hildegard’s mysticism supported her status as one of the most educated persons in Europe. Julian of Norwich’s (d. after 1416) Revelations of Divine Love is no less thoughtful than her scholastic contemporaries, if differently so: Julian wrestles with the difficult question of what sort of metaphors are suitable for God, as well as hard question of gender in theological language, in calling God, even Christ, ‘Mother’. Amidst the Catholic Reformation, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and John of the Cross (1542–1591) combined incisive analysis and thoughtful argument with artful, passionate expression in the service of communicating even what they knew to be incommunicable.
In Eastern Christianity, the question of theological language and mysticism erupted in the ‘hesychast controversy’, when Barlaam of Calabria (d. 1348) and Gregory Akindynos (d. c. 1348) challenged Gregory Palamas (d. 1359) over the doctrine that, in higher stages of contemplation, Athonite monks were mentally and spiritually united with the uncreated light of God seen at the transfiguration. Palamas argued that this Tabor Light was not God’s essence but God’s energies – still the uncreated God, but distinct from God’s essence. Thus, Palamas – who was vindicated at a series of fourteenth-century Constantinopolitan synods – paired a strong view of mystical knowledge of God with a radical apophaticism about God’s essence.
2.4 Theological language in modern and postmodern theology
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought offered new challenges. For Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the structures of human psychology and cognition contribute the categories by which we understand the world. He thus distinguishes between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things as they are in themselves), concluding that we cannot cognize noumena, since they are beyond our experience. For Kant, ‘thoughts without content [given in experience] are empty, intuitions [given by experience] without concepts are blind’ (Critique of Pure Reason A51/B75; 1998: 193–194). Because God is only an idea, with no corresponding intuition, knowledge of God is not possible. For this reason, in the Fourth Antinomy of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), he argues that the question of God’s existence cannot be solved by pure reason alone. Rather, he sees God as a postulate of practical reason, something without which we cannot act morally, but whose existence we cannot secure by speculative reason. Kant’s challenge is that for theological language oriented towards factual description of God and the world, there is no meaning to be had, no knowledge to be given. For this reason, Kant posits that he ‘had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (Bxxx; Kant 1998: 117).
The challenge that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) posed has been interpreted differently, owing to the famous difficulty of his texts. Hegel examines the all-embracing Absolute Spirit (i.e. God) through Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit. He strives to overcome binaries, including those between subject and object, thinking and being, and God and humanity. Some charge Hegel with obliterating divine mystery by capturing reality from a ‘God’s eye view’, or making God absolutely inscrutable; bringing God ‘down’ to be completely identified with creatures, or exalting a deified creation. All these options challenge orthodox understandings of theological language, which appreciate God’s presence and otherness, balancing divine mystery with God’s self-revelation. One might ultimately agree with Nicholas Adams that most critical readings of Hegel constitute question-begging misunderstandings:
We cannot say that Hegel ‘reduces’ everything to human thinking, or that Hegel ‘absorbs’ everything into divine being. To say these things is to reinstate the false opposition between thinking and being. This is, of course, what many commentators do when they criticize Hegel. But they completely miss the point of the whole exercise in so doing. (Adams 2013: 15)
Nevertheless, Hegel has usually been read, as Adams affirms, in the metaphysically monist terms presented above, posing thereby a challenge to traditional Christian thought and speech about God.
A colleague, and later rival, of Hegel’s at the University of Berlin was the Reformed thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As he writes in On Religion (1799), the essence of religion lies ‘in intuition and feeling’ (Second Speech [1996: 22]; KGA 1/2: 211): specifically, in our awareness ‘of ourselves as absolutely dependent or […] as being in relation with God’ (Christian Faith section 4 [Schleiermacher 2016: 18]; KGA 1/13: 32). Thus, Christian doctrines are ‘the account of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech’ (section 15; KGA 1/13: 127). For Schleiermacher, language about God explores this feeling of dependence. One cannot speak of intuition (the precognitive, immediate, encounter with the universe) and feeling (the subjective affect in us resulting from this encounter) at once, and in our attempt to express the intuition of religion and its feeling in one go, we divide them up, and thus cannot speak the fundamental nature of religion. In Manfred Frank’s (1997: 7) summary of Schleiermacher’s view, ‘[t]he cognitive ground of self-consciousness – its immediate being-transparent-to-itself – thus becomes peculiarly delayed in relation to the ground of its being’.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was concerned with the ‘bankruptcy in an intellectual-spiritual sense’ of Christian language (JP 5: 5181; Pap. IA 328). Steven Shakespeare (2001) interprets Kierkegaard as being neither a ‘metaphysical realist’ nor an ‘anti-realist’, but an ‘ethical realist’, since for Kierkegaard, God must be known from within the ascetic, Christian form of life. In Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard describes three life forms – the aesthetic (characterized by hedonistic seeking after pleasure), the ethical (which sees value in communal morality), and the religious (which finds in God its ultimate source of meaning). This ‘life form’ is fundamental because the ‘object’ of religious speech – God – is no mere ‘object’, no item of historical knowledge on which we can take an ‘objective’ standpoint. The kind of relationship that we can have with God cannot be captured by statements from a purely objective ‘God’s eye’ view; thus, we must know God subjectively. Kierkegaard’s favoured categories of ‘paradox’ and ‘the absurd’ guard against any belief that we can capture God and the world in a single vision. For this reason, Kierkegaard finds it impossible to separate form and content in his writings; his goal is the transformation of a self for whom language both uncovers and conceals its full depths. All theological speech, all language in general, must be understood within this existential journey.
Whereas Kierkegaard did not take the subjectivity of theological language to mean that God was a mental construct, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) made precisely this move. Feuerbach argued that God was an outward projection of a maximized and perfected version of our inner human person. Marx sought to deconstruct the religious ‘opium’ that impeded his Communist revolution. Nietzsche claimed that ‘God is dead’, not because he denied that God exists, but because his new understanding of the human good as a ‘will to power’ and his notion of the Übermensch (‘Superman’) are so incommensurable with former Christian ‘slave morality’ that the question of God ceases to be relevant, even stops making sense. And Freud understood God as a fantasy built from an inbuilt psychological need for a parental figure. These thinkers and their mainstream followers challenge the intelligibility and usefulness of theological language, though some Christians (such as Westphal 1998) find value in these ‘masters of suspicion’.
Responding to an overblown emphasis on God’s interiority to creatures, and resisting a vision of God at work within an enlightened and progressively improving human history (he especially protested when such a notion of divine action was used to justify Nazi policies), Karl Barth (1886–1968) is commonly understood as presenting a God apart from, though freely active in, the world. When the Jesuit priest Erich Przywara (1889–1972) or the Reformed theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) advocated in differing ways for natural theology, finding knowledge of God within the world, Barth resists, responding that the only Anknüpfungspunkt (‘point of contact’) between God and creatures is God’s grace and our response in faith – this is Barth’s analogia fidei, ‘analogy of faith’. There are positive and negative elements to Barth’s views on theological language, both captured by Trevor Hart:
God himself must speak in, with and through our human speech-acts about him if the relevant terms are actually to speak truthfully, and only within a personal relationship of faith and obedience can we begin to grasp dimly what these terms now come to mean. Otherwise they remain opaque, veiling the divine reality rather than revealing it, and leaving us only with the natural and mundane capacities of human language, with its established trajectories of vocabulary and syntax. (Hart 2013: 38)
While creatures have no power to know or speak of God in themselves, God can use language – being one of God’s creatures, and thus under God’s power – to reveal himself to creatures. Thus, God involves creatures in knowing and speaking of God by granting a capacity of knowing and speaking of God to creatures, who are naturally incapable of such activities (Church Dogmatics [CD] I/1: 241).
The negative element of Barth’s view is that our sin and creatureliness forbid us from speaking truly on our own terms, and it is by grace alone that ‘whatever is said by us was, is and will be truly said in [God]’ (CD II/1: 228). For Barth, ‘[w]e use our words improperly and pictorially – as we can now say, looking back from divine revelation – when we apply them within the confines of what is appropriate to us as creatures’ (CD II/1: 229). Thus (moving to the positive element), we come to scripture with a preconceived notion of ‘fatherhood’ or ‘goodness’ to understand what it means to call God ‘father’ or ‘good’. We find in God the preeminent form of fatherhood, for example, such that when we use the words ‘father’ and ‘goodness’ about anything else, the words do not really apply, since creaturely paternity pales compared to God’s. Once we have encountered scriptural language applied to God, our concepts must be transformed and read back into the world.
Twentieth-century theology also saw a renewed attention to the question of apophaticism, facilitated by greater communication between Western and Eastern theologians. The Russian émigré theologian Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) engaged in the work of ressourcement, bringing treasures from the history of Christian thought to bear on contemporary questions. His landmark book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944; see Lossky 1976) and the posthumously published Theologie Negative et Connaissance de Dieu chez Maitre Eckhart (1960; see Lossky 2024) and The Vision of God (1961; see Lossky 1963) draw upon theological history, especially Greek sources, to renew an apophatic focus. Relatedly, twentieth-century thinkers of mysticism and religious experience such as William James (1842–1910), Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), and many others pushed Christian theology to attend more to questions of theological language within more experiential contexts.
Twentieth-century philosophy presented challenges to religious language on both sides of the ‘analytic’/‘continental’ divide. A salient consideration especially in the twentieth century is the ‘linguistic turn’: attention to the ways in which all thinking is intimately tied to particular linguistic expression. We cannot ‘get behind’ language to discover a form of pure thinking; we only think about the world as conditioned by the language we use. Language is not a passive medium through which the world comes to us. Attention to language shows how human artifice, culture, and speech patterns condition and construct our view of reality.
On the ‘continental’ side, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) argued in Being and Time (1928; see Heidegger 1962) that for Dasein, that for whom the question of being arises, being is always conditioned by time and oriented towards death. For this reason, language about an eternal God has no place in philosophy. Heidegger’s interest in the ways language reveals being caused him later to proclaim in his Letter on Humanism (1946; see Heidegger 1977) that language, the ‘house’ of being, itself speaks. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) expresses in his concept of différance the conditionedness of language by both time and ‘difference’: signs only have meaning as differentiated from other signs. A language must be taken as a whole, each term understood in relation to every other. There is no eternal ‘signified’ untouched by temporality and difference which language indicates, nor is language stable or unchanging. Thus, Derrida proclaims in Of Grammatology (1967; see Derrida 1997): ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – there is nothing outside the text. The challenge to theological language posed by Heidegger and Derrida is that speech cannot refer ‘beyond’ a world conditioned by time and language’s instability; thus, any talk of an eternal, unchanging realm has no leg on which to stand.
Another important development in ‘continental’ philosophy and theology of language is in hermeneutics: the quest for a ‘philosophical theory and method with which we can fix or ascertain the nature, character, conditions, and limits of every possible act of understanding’ (Keane and Lawn 2015: 1), as taken up by thinkers like Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). An especially important idea is the ‘hermeneutical circle’: understanding something in the whole requires an understanding of its parts, but understanding its parts requires an understanding of the whole. For this reason, hermeneutic thinkers insist that ‘as finite and historical beings, we understand because we are guided by anticipations, expectations, and questions’ (Grondin 2015: 299). This circle is inescapable, so we must enter it rightly.
There are various Christian responses to continental thought, many of which explain religious language in immanentist terms, destabilizing our ‘metaphysical’ conceptions from within. The philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) – a student of Derrida and inheritor of Heidegger – develops a view of theological language as fundamentally practical, about prayer and praise (Marion 1999a). For Marion, God’s self-revelation is a ‘saturated phenomenon’, an appearing which makes clear that it cannot be encapsulated by our concepts, destabilizing our patterns of thinking by its very appearing. Likewise, the poet-theologian Kevin Hart (b. 1954) interprets Derridean deconstruction and theological speech alike as non-metaphysical, as destabilizing every metaphysical system (Hart 1989). Marion and Hart, like many Christians in the wake of ‘continental’ philosophy, focus on apophasis, interpreting the task of theological language as either (or both) fundamentally practice-oriented and/or a rejection of solid, permanent, eternal meaning. Hermeneutics, especially in the work of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and Ricœur, is rooted in questions of biblical interpretation. Hermeneutical theology – a movement inspired by Barth and Bultmann which includes theologians like Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001), Ernst Fuchs (1903–1983), and Eberhard Jüngel (1934–2021) – interprets God’s self-revelation in human language also as an act of God’s self-interpretation.
On the ‘analytic’ side, A. J. Ayer argued in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) that religious language, like all language not verifiable by observation and science, is literally nonsensical. Logical positivism prompted many critical responses, including Alvin Platinga’s (1967) comparison of belief in God with the problem of other minds, and John Hick’s (1957) account of ‘eschatological verification’: the possibility that religious assertions could be verified after death. A thinker associated with, but quite different from, the logical positivists is the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), despite possible differences between them, both focus language’s roles beyond the merely ‘representative’. Thinkers such as David Burrell (1973), Fergus Kerr (1986), D. Z. Phillips (1993), Rowan Williams (2014; 2018), and Stephen Mulhall (2015) adopt elements of Wittgenstein’s thought – rules and ‘grammar’, ‘family resemblance’, ‘language games’, among others – to show how creaturely speech can remain open to God in ways that surpass understanding, while remaining well-motivated.
The American Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck (1923–2018), adopted Wittgenstein’s work, alongside the scholarship of twentieth-century thinkers like the sociologist Clifford Geertz and the linguist Noam Chomsky, to develop a new view of doctrinal language. Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) adopts a ‘postliberal’ approach to God-talk which rejects ‘cognitive-propositionalist’ accounts of religious language – claiming that language about God corresponds to external truths about God, which Lindbeck associates with the scholastics – and ‘experiential–expressive’ accounts – interpreting God-talk as corresponding to internal feelings, a view Lindbeck gets from Schleiermacher. Lindbeck develops a ‘cultural-linguistic’ view of theological language, on which doctrinal statements serve as rules for speech within specific communities. Lindbeck attempts both (1) to do justice to the particularity of individual religious and denominational traditions, and (2) to recognize the compatibility of apparently different doctrinal formulations by seeing these statements in functional terms. For Lindbeck, religious truth cannot be a matter of correspondence to an external correspondent but is rather a question of coherence with a form of life, the form of life enacted by the community, delineated by doctrine. Inspired by the work of his Yale colleague Hans Frei (1974), Lindbeck argues for an ‘intratextual’ view wherein theology describes the world according to scripture, rather than interpreting scripture in light of the world.
Beyond Wittgenstein, contemporary Anglophone philosophy of religion and analytic theology generally sees theological language as univocal – even the dispute between William Alston (1993; 2005) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2005) on interpreting Aquinas’ analogy assumes that some kind of univocity is indispensable – though this univocal consensus is not universal (see Chow 2018; Hewitt 2020). Eleonore Stump (2015: 29) adopts ‘narrative’ as a central category of religious language to resist standard analytic accounts of language, ‘combin[ing] the techniques of philosophy and literary criticism in order to achieve something neither set of techniques would accomplish on its own’. In raising questions of narrative in dialogue with the problem of evil or suffering, Stump hopes to give philosophers ‘access to a side of reality that can be captured better in narratives than in non-narrative prose but to give us access to it as philosophers’.
A relevant question for theological language is the issue of ‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ about religious language. This question has been raised especially in in analytic theology and philosophy of religion (see Insole 2006; Moore and Scott 2007) and science and theology circles (see Torrance 1969; Barbour 1974; Pannenberg 1976; McGrath 2002). In the latter context, the question of whether theology is ‘scientific’ involves analysing theological methods and claims in dialogue with the philosophy of science, particular when it comes to questions of verifiability/falsifiability, the relationship of models or paradigms to reality, and the question of what it means for a science to be true to its object of study. In theology, when that object is God, how does this difference make theology different from, though no less scientific than, the natural sciences?
