Analog Christ, Part 1: Analogy & God

A provisional response to Tim Troutner

Tim Troutner has twice written on his substack (here & here) critiquing the idea that theological language must in all cases be limited to analogy. Now let me first say that the above pieces were presented as the first part of a longer series, and Troutner has made it clear that he does indeed intend to publish more about this. He will have more to say, and it is possible that he intends to address some of my points below in future writing. But I am going to address his argument as it stands now, because I think it is has some serious weaknesses. And I should note here that I have also left lengthy comments on this subject, both on Troutner’s substack and on Andrew Kuiper’s substack (the first comment here and the second here). Anyway, enough preamble, let’s get to it:

Now, the topic of analogy and theology is an old and complex one—and I am no expert on the twists and turns of the debate throughout the ages. That said, my sense is that for many people (especially those who have not formally studied Christian theology), this topic will be a new one, so I want to make sure we are on the same page before we dive into the thorny philosophical and theological debate proper. As ever, my goal is accessibility and clarity, so here is a very rough and ready summary of the fundamental issue. So let’s begin with a (relatively!) brief discussion of what analogy even is.

A Brief Discussion of Analogy

When we use a specific word, we use that word as a sign—something that points to something other than itself. In using a given word, we have basically three options for how it refers to its meaning(s) across differing contexts: we can speak univocally, equivocally, or analogically.¹

Univocal speech is straightforward: if a term is used univocally, then it is used identically, to mean the same thing, across the various contexts in consideration. So when we say, for example, that an early Spring morning is cool, and the milk in your refrigerator is cool, and that a spot of shade under a tree is cool, we mean the word “cool” in each case univocally—each of these things are relatively low in temperature (though not very cold). Of course, each of these things have plenty of differences between them—a morning, a bottle of milk, and a shady patch of soil are obviously not identical. But in describing them as cool, we are saying the same thing about their relative temperatures (even if the exact temperature is not the same between them).

Equivocal language is a bit trickier. In this case, even though we are using the same word or phrase, that word or phrase has a completely different meaning in the differing contexts we are considering. Taking the word “cool” again: If I describe an early Spring day as cool, then I am referring to its physical temperature. Meanwhile, if I describe Selena Gomez as cool, hopefully I am not referring to her temperature—we humans need to stay quite warm to continue functioning. Instead, in calling a celebrity cool, I am not referring to their temperature at all, but rather saying something like: they are popular, or culturally relevant, or fun. Now this usage is clearly not univocal to the first usage which refers to temperature. But whether it is truly and fully equivocal is a unclear at first glance. But looking at even further possible meanings of the word may clear things up a bit:

Interestingly, we can use the word “cool” in reference to people in quite a different way from this 2nd meaning discussed above. If we very enthusiastically tell our friends that we got tickets to see Selena Gomez perform, and they respond with decidedly less enthusiasm, we might say their reaction was “cool”. In this case, we mean neither that their reaction was low in temperature nor that their reaction was popular, relevant, or fun. Instead, we mean simply that they were unenthusiastic.

Now it certainly seems that this meaning of “cool” and the original meaning referring to temperature are closely linked. I think most of us intuitively grasp how a human’s being unenthusiastic, if expressed in the language of temperature, might be described as cool, whereas someone’s being enthusiastic might be described as warm (the former seeming to express “low energy” while the latter seeming to manifest a “higher energy” social response.) This third meaning isn’t univocal, yet it’s definitely not equivocal either.

Now, we should note the curious fact that, under the 2nd definition above, something’s being cool can actually engender quite a lot of enthusiasm (“She’s so cool! I can’t wait to meet her!”)—meaning that the two variant meanings can, under certain circumstances, almost mean the opposite of each other—but even more confusingly, the 2nd usage above has also spawned a 4th one: when my wife tells me she will be home at 2pm and I respond, “cool, see you then”, I am definitely not trying to portray a trendy air of nonchalance, popularity, relevance, or fun, nor am I expressing a lack of enthusiasm. I just mean something like, “OK, understood.” Interestingly, while the first 3 uses of cool are all adjectival, this last usage is either an adverb, an interjection, or an exclamation. Its meaning hasn’t just shifted, but its grammatical role has as well.

Now it seems to me that this fourth meaning of the word “cool” is surely equivocal to its original usage to refer to temperature. There no longer seems to be any conceptual commonality between the two usages, even if etymologically we could draft a genealogy that would show their linkage in the past. If someone were totally unfamiliar with this 4th usage, but knew the 1st definition only, it seems likely that they would be confused if someone used “cool” to mean “OK”. I don’t think they would be able to reason to this new usage on their own. This shows that the same word can mean two completely different things, depending on the context.

But what about that earlier alternate meaning, the third one mentioned above, in which people’s reactions to things can be described as warm or cool to mean enthusiastic or unenthusiastic? As we saw above, this usage surely can’t be univocal, since whether a person is “warm” or “cold” towards us, presumably their core temperature is right around 98.6°F. But, it also doesn’t seem like the usage is equivocal either, since, again, most of us intuitively grasp how an unenthusiastic response “feels” cool while an enthusiastic response “feels” warm.

Here is where analogy steps in. In analogical usage, a word is used neither univocally nor equivocally. Instead, it is used in a way that is similar, but not identical, to the way it is used in some other context. And it certainly seems to me that the use of “cool” to describe a person’s emotional or social reaction to something is analogous to the usage of “cool” to describe the temperature of something.²

Now, this isn’t a substack on linguistics, and I am not a linguist, and anyway, our quarry today is theological. So I won’t dwell (further) on the nuts and bolts of analogy. But I hope the above discussion clarifies what we mean by these three modes of language—univocity, equivocacy, and analogy—because they are crucial to our discussion below.

Analogy & Theology

Now, as mentioned above, there is a long tradition in Christian theology of insisting that our language about God must always be analogical. This is most famously addressed in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, but the basic logic of the claim goes back much further than Aquinas (and indeed beyond the church’s founding) and continues to be relevant today. And indeed, I have discussed it before.

The basic argument goes like this: basic Christian orthodoxy³ asserts that God is the creator of the cosmos, that which defines being and is its source⁴ and sustainer. This puts the relationship between God and the cosmos in a strange position: on the one hand, God clearly isn’t some kind of entity existing in the cosmos—since how could something that was contained in and defined by the cosmos be the “thing” that causes⁵ the cosmos to be? I can’t give birth to myself, and something contained in the cosmos couldn’t be the thing that generates the cosmos, since in that case it would depend on the very thing it supposedly generates for its own generation. So God must transcend the cosmos, “existing” “beyond” it.

Not so fast, though, because if God really is that which defines and sustains the cosmos, then it stands to reason that the cosmos only exists because God continues to will it to exist.⁶ Again, according to orthodox Christian thought (and many other religions to boot) God causes the world to exist, not as some past action at the beginning of the creation, but as a metaphysical act which is eternal and, therefore, always “presently happening” (or: God is the existence of the existents, the Being of beings, or, better still, the condition of possibility of that existence or Being). In this sense, though, God seems to be profoundly intimate to the cosmos. If the cosmos is an act that God is doing, if existence is contingent upon God’s willing “continuously” in the present, then it certainly seems like God does not transcend the world at all. God must be right here, right now, doing this. So, God must be completely immanent⁷ to the cosmos.

Alright, then: God both utterly transcends the cosmos, is utterly beyond it and in no way contained by it and—but, also—God is completely immanent to the cosmos, literally present to, through, and in every event and being, bar none. Isn’t this a contradiction? How can God be both transcendent to, and yet immanent within, the cosmos?

This is in many ways the driving question within any inclusive/qualitative monotheistic philosophical theology. The goal of theology, though, is not so much to answer this question, but rather to meditate on, to contemplate, it. The truth of this seeming contradiction is the central paradox not only of theology but, at least for many of us Christians⁸ (and, again, quite a few folks from other traditions too!) the central paradox of existence itself—a beautiful, unsolvable mystery that discloses to us not only who God is, but who we are as creatures eternally and infinitely beloved of that God.

But the point we need to grasp in all of this is that it seems that only analogical language can work if we want to describe this God who is both transcendent and immanent. Now, a purely immanent god—a deity who was a being that lived in the cosmos but did not create it—could, at least in theory, be described in purely univocal terms. And a purely transcendent god—some kind of distant demiurge who made the world as a separate entity, a kind of clockwork exhibit that was left to run of its own devices and which that demiurge then turned away from—could, at least in theory, be described in purely equivocal terms.

But a God who is transcendentally immanent will never be describable in purely univocal or equivocal terms, because, on the one hand, if God truly transcends the phenomenal order, if God is the source and definer of the rules of being, then God cannot be limited by those rules, yet our language is drawn exclusively from the things so limited. This would seem to require only equivocal reference to God. But, on the other hand, the very same God is constantly active in the cosmos, not in violating those rules, but in constantly upholding them in being as an act of loving, gracious will. The very realm of being, with all of its limits, is itself an act of God which must necessarily disclose at least something of who God is, because we can say “God is doing this” or at least “God is allowing this to happen” about all events which do occur.⁹ This cosmos is itself already a kind of predicate which applies to God. And this would seem to require univocal language, since every event is God’s own doing (in some way or another).

So we somehow need language that works both univocally and equivocally—and, in short, that’s what analogy provides us. If I may be allowed the lazy decadence of quoting myself:

Analogical language about God uses this similar-but-different feature of analogical language in general to allow us to speak about God without losing the real and necessary difference between the things of everyday experience and God. So we can say that God is the creator, in that God “causes” existence to be, while also remembering that, of course, God’s act of creation is quite different from our own creative work. Likewise, we can truthfully say that God is good, and yet remember that God’s goodness must be radically different from the goodness of anything in our world, since God would seem to need to be the source of goodness as such.

The same strategy can work with references like God as father, mother, or castle. The idea of comparing God to a parent is obvious; if God causes us to be and loves us, then that sounds a lot like what our parents are like (or what we hope they are like, at least). Yet, again, we know that God can’t be thought of literally as a parent: a human mother has her ability to reproduce given to her by someone else (her parents); likewise, many of us are well aware that a human’s ability to reproduce can be damaged or even nonexistent from the outset. Furthermore, our ability to reproduce depends on all manner of other outside factors, such as access to food, water, oxygen, etc. In the absence of these, we won’t be making any babies.

But God’s “parental” relationship to us and our world would have none of these limiting factors, since God would be not only our source, but also the metaphysical principle that allows for anything to be the source of anything at all in the first place—the source of “sourceness”.

OK, so we can’t talk about God without analogy, a view well documented and supported in the history of Christian theology. What’s the problem that Troutner has identified? As I said at the outset above, Troutner has recently written two pieces critiquing analogical language in theology. In the first, he sees the requirement to use analogy in theology as part of a larger problem in contemporary theology. In the second, he focuses specifically on how analogy can (or cannot) be used to address claims about Jesus’s divinity. I will address the first piece here, and the second one in part 2 of this series.

Crisis

Troutner’s first critique of analogy came in “Crisis of a House Divided”, in which Troutner discusses the recent work of Jordan Daniel Wood, especially his book The Whole Mystery of Christ. Troutner sees Wood’s work as exploding an uneasy compromise (or ceasefire) between two schools of (primarily) Roman Catholic theologians: neoscholastic Thomists and the nouvelle theologie school of ressourcement theology. Neither school was able to achieve hegemony, either ecclesiastically or academically, and so, Troutner argues, many scholars chose a kind of mid-point between them, despite their differences.

Now the details of these two schools’ of thought and their conflict are interesting and important—but they are not the focus of my piece today. What is important to our discussion is the specific form that Troutner argues the compromise between them took:

1. An unsurpassable analogical “gap” or caesura between creature and Creator, even in Christ’s own person

2. The “double gratuity” of creation and redemption (the counterfactual voluntarism in which God both could not have created and could have created without calling creatures to a supernatural end)

3. An insistence on faith’s inaccessibility to speculative reason.

Troutner sees each of these elements of the compromise as fundamentally unstable and theologically dubious, largely because they were arrived at not through a consistent process of philosophical reasoning and exegesis from scripture, but rather by piecing together two mutually exclusive systematic theologies (or, if you like, putting new wine in old skins).

Troutner, then, insists that theologians must break this alliance of convenience in order to arrive at a theology that is both authentic to the tradition and philosophically robust in modern terms. Now, I want to begin by saying I agree with Troutner that positions #2 and #3 are untenable, and, to the extent that someone actually holds those positions, I think they are wrong to do so. But again, those are complex topics that I will not address here and now.

My concern is with the first position: Troutner argues that many contemporary theologians maintain that there is an “unsurpassable analogical “gap” or caesura between creature and Creator” and that this claim is also untenable. But I think Troutner has defined the problem in an incoherent way, and that no one can actually hold the position he is accusing others of believing, at least not as it is formulated here.

I hope that our previous discussion of analogy will already indicate the problem with Troutner’s formulation: he is arguing that the requirement that all theological language be analogical introduces an “unsurpassable…gap” between creature and Creator. But as I discussed above, the idea that there is such a gap would result in a requirement not for analogical, but for equivocal language. Analogy is precisely the kind of language theologians use when we want to insist on a kind of both/and: there is an infinite gap between us and God, but also there is a complete intimacy, a complete lack of gap, all at once.

In other words, it seems to me that what Troutner is critiquing is equivocal language, yet he refers to that as “analogical”. I think this is a big problem. If, on the one hand, Troutner really does want to critique analogical language, I think he will need to be sure to describe it accurately—in which case, no discussion of an “unsurpassable…gap”, on its own, will be adequate. On the other hand, if he means simply to critique equivocal language which tries to mask itself by calling itself “analogical”, well, I think he needs to specify that that is what he intends. And I should clarify that if it was or is this second position that Troutner intends, I would be happy to second and support his critique.

However, as we will see next time, Troutner seems to think any requirement for analogical language in theology is not only suspect, but ultimately logically incoherent. So we will turn to his discussion of analogy and Christology next week.

Analog Christ, Part 2: Analogy & Jesus

1. It’s important to note that this distinction in how individual words signify their referents applies across all genres of writing. Whether one is writing a technical, personal, philosophical, theological, poetic, or scientific work (or some blend of those genres), the words used in the text will need to signify their referents either univocally, equivocally, or analogically relative to other uses of the same word.

2. Meanwhile, the 2nd usage above is a bit trickier. Is it analogous, or equivocal? It seems to me there is some ambiguity here. I do think most people can sense a link between something’s being cool (in the sense of temperature) and something’s being popular, so long as that popularity is marked by nonchalance, which itself is linked to the idea of coolness as a lack of enthusiasm. But the link here certainly seems more tenuous than with that usage (the 3rd listed above). Perhaps we have to think of things being either clearly or ambiguously analogous, or perhaps we can think of usages as sitting on a spectrum of analogy, with some being more so and some less. I will leave this thornier question to the linguists, because resolving it is not necessary for the theological work to come…

3. Much of what I have to say here will apply to Jewish and Muslim, and often even Hindu and other religious communities. But I am going to limit my discussion to Christian theology both because that is what I know best and because, eventually, our discussion will be about Christology itself.

4. Depending on how one interprets the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the word “source” here may ruffle some feathers. But I think there is no way around this view as will become clear below.

5. Not “caused”!

6. Note how extremely Christian theology and Deism differ here.

7. Not “imminent”!

8. Unless one is Reformed, in which case one’s theological language has probably taken a very different course, as David Bentley Hart recently made clear: “perhaps nihilism achieved its first and fullest expression in Calvinism, then, as the inevitable reductio ad absurdum of the whole late Augustinian tradition, filtered through late mediaeval voluntarism and nominalism, disencumbered of all the metaphysical sophistries of Thomism, and pronounced with triumphant glee. In the absolute sovereignty of the Calvinist God, which is prior to good or evil (and therefore evil), and which is absolute potentia and absolute arbitrium, the whole moral structure and meaning of existence becomes the empty decision of an infinite will. This is simply satanism, but without even the consolations of hedonism and transgression to make it colorful.”

9. This, of course, raises the problem of evil—an important topic in its own right!—which I will not be trying to address here and now.