Pale Analogies and Dead Metaphors: Some Recent Trends in Religious Language

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Christian tradition, accounts of religious language have commonly centered on analogical predication arising from a created world that reflects its Creator. Recent decades have witnessed a change: metaphor has gone into ascendance while analogy has suffered an eclipse. This essay critiques four trends in contemporary accounts of religious language: the ascription of universal range to metaphor; inadequate accounts of the nature of metaphor; insufficient attention given to the nature of literal speech; and the consequent deficient understandings of the relationship of metaphor and analogy. I then draw on Thomas Aquinas for an account of religious speech that defends the cognitive indispensability of metaphor while arguing for the logical primacy of analogy.