Monday, March 23, 2020

Ways That the Bible Describes Jehovah

I just finished listening to an old talk by a brother, who said there are three ways the Bible talks about Jehovah: 1) metaphors; 2) similes; 3) anthropomorphisms.

Some would put analogy on the list and I would say that some descriptions are possibly literal ways of describing Jehovah or they're univocal (monosemous). I did not hear the brother make this point, but as I've said before, "Father" seems metaphorical to me.

One example the talk used for anthropomorphism is "the hand of Jehovah."
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4 comments:

  1. Roman9:52 AM

    I think the ONLY ways we can talk about Jehovah is apophatically, or through analogy/metaphor (I include anthropomorphism in metaphor)

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  2. Roman9:58 AM

    With the closest analogy being "God is love" which I think could be drawn out metaphysically, I know there is a long tradition of Theologians interpreting that in a trinitarian way (going back to Augustine, and perhaps even further), but I think a Unitarian (JW compatible) approach could make even better sense of the God as Love.

    I wrote a bit about this on my blog. (Hope you don't mind if I post links):

    https://musingontheology.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/god-as-love-part-1/
    https://musingontheology.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/god-as-love-part-2/
    https://musingontheology.wordpress.com/2019/10/18/god-as-love-part-3/
    https://musingontheology.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/god-as-love-part-4/

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  3. Edgar Foster3:16 PM

    I will read your blog posts: they look interesting. You likely know about the Thomistic and Scotistic debate between univocal and analogical language pertaining to God. While the two may not be as disparate as they seem, I tend to agree with Scotus' univocity of being theory; at least, to some degree.

    Also see this article by Michael P. Levine, who is building on the work of William Alston (the late philosopher of language).

    Augustine of Hippo and Novatian of Rome likewise had interesting to say about theological language.

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  4. Roman1:50 AM

    I think I have to read more about Scotus, most of what I know about him come from Thomists, and the "radical orthodox" crowd, who have a negative view of him.

    Augustine's analysis is extremely helpful (althought I disagree with much of his system, no one can doubt his care and nuance).

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