Analog Christ, Part 2: Analogy & Jesus

A provisional response to Tim Troutner

Last week, I introduced the basics of analogical language and discussed why so many philosophers and theologians insist that we must use analogical language when we talk about God. Then I introduced Tim Troutner’s critique of analogy in general. If you haven’t read that piece yet, I would do so before proceeding.

(Editorial note: I wrote this piece and had it scheduled to go live on July 31, 2025. The day before that, Troutner published a second part to the original post of his that I was responding to here. This piece only addresses the first part of the “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” series, but I do plan to now add at least one more part to this series in response to part 2 and further posts from Troutner. That said, nothing in part 2 of that series substantially changes the points I want to make below anyway.)

Analog Christ, Part 1: Analogy & God

The Quest for Christ’s Identity

After publishing “Crisis in a House Divided”, Troutner published a second piece on the subject of analogy which strongly suggests that he thinks analogical language (or, at least the requirement to only use analogical language in theology) is itself the problem: “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” (part 1). Here, Troutner doesn’t critique analogical language about God in general, but makes a more specific and provocative argument.¹

Again, I certainly recommend that you read the piece itself, especially if Christology is not a topic you are familiar with. But I will offer first a short quote that I think expresses Troutner’s central thesis and goal, and then a short, and, I hope, fair summation of Troutner’s argument, before diving in the issues more deeply:

My central concern is Christology. That was the third point I was getting to. I’m worried that the analogical gap (hiatus/diastema), if it is held to be fundamental or unsurpassable, will forbid us from saying what we are confessionally obligated to say about Christ. Namely, I am worried about a form of Nestorianism, or a division of Christ’s person. This is the unwitting upshot, I fear, of this form of analogy, or would be if its adherents were consistent. I’m worried, that is, about a subtle denial of the Incarnation, a denial that concretely humanity and divinity, creature and Creator did in at least one case come together in a subsistent unity (or hypostasis). I further hold (and this will require an additional step) that the only way to account for this subsistent unity—which Christ is—is one that also entitles and obligates us to speak of humanity and divinity as (hypostatically) identical.

Ultimately, I think Troutner’s argument in “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” (part 1) takes basically the following form (though this is my gloss of his words, not his words verbatim):

1. Fundamental to Christian belief is the claim that Jesus is God.

2. This claim would seem to be univocal rather than analogical: we mean that the human Jesus, quite literally, is divine, full stop.

3. If this Christological claim about God is not analogical, then obviously there can be no general requirement that all language about God must be analogical.

Now I think this is a decent, though (as we will see) not unassailable argument. I certainly think that Troutner has, by locating the debate within Christology, positioned his anti-analogical argument on probably its strongest possible ground (at least for Christian discourse). Surely, point 1 is beyond debate, at least for those professing orthodox Christian belief: for us, Jesus is divine, full stop. However, I think point 2 assumes too much and is ultimately incorrect, and therefore that point 3 fails as well. Let’s dig in to it.

Essentially, Troutner seems to be arguing that insisting that the profession of Jesus’s divinity is meant only analogically would sever the unity between Jesus’s humanity and divinity—and, ultimately, that this would amount to effectively denying his divinity altogether, or at least so qualifying it that Jesus is essentially demoted from true or full divinity.² Now, I certainly agree with him that if someone argued that the word “divine”, when applied to Jesus, was being used equivocally to its usage when applied to say, “God” in general or “God the Father” in particular, that would be unacceptable, since it would suggest that there are two kinds of divinity, resulting in Jesus being either a reduced and contingent demi-god (perhaps on somewhat Arian terms) or even a second deity which was metaphysically unrelated to the first (perhaps in somewhat Manichaean terms). Neither option will work for orthodox Christian thought: Jesus must be divine just as God the Father is, of one “being” with the Triune God in general (as Nicaea insists: Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…”).

So this would seem to demand that language about Jesus’s divinity—the task of Christology—must indeed be univocal. But not so fast! The church has been down this road before, and so much of this debate is well-rehearsed. And there are problems with purely univocal Christological language as well.

God, Jesus, and Mary Walk Into a Bar…

One of the great disagreements in the (later) early Christian church was about whether Mary, Jesus’s mother, could be referred to as the Theotokos: “the God-bearer”, that is, the one who gave birth to God. Many theologians argued, quite understandably, that this title was both incoherent and probably blasphemous; after all, God is without beginning or end, and so cannot be born. This party, who came to be associated with the “Nestorians”³, preferred to refer to Mary as the Christotokos: the Christ-bearer, the one who gave birth to (Jesus) Christ alone, rather than to God as such. For the “Nestorians” (and other related parties who stressed the two distinct natures of Christ over their unity), this term was both more technically correct while also guarding against any philosophically confused notion of God-as-such being born.

But, the pro-Theotokos party—who, spoiler warning, would go on to win and whose position would come to be the catholic and orthodox position, at least within the vast majority of churches—thought that the term Christotokos didn’t go far enough, and risked demeaning Christ’s true divinity. After all, if Jesus really is divine, if Jesus really is God, and Jesus really was born, then aren’t we forced to say that God was, indeed, born—no matter what metaphysical embarrassment this might cause?

Well…yes and no. The reality is that the church found itself affirming what seemed like a contradiction, and so had to think hard about how this could be resolved, or transformed into a necessary paradox. We saw last week that this same tension lies at the heart of the the need for theology to affirm both that God is transcendent and yet immanent, so this was not a wholly new task for theology.

The resolution came in the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, the “communication of idioms”.⁴ According to this position, since Jesus is both human and divine, we can affirm predicates of Jesus that properly apply either to his humanity or his divinity, yet we must recognize that in doing so, we are affirming those predicates only so far as they apply to either his humanity or his divinity as such, even if we apply them to the unity of Jesus as human and divine, simultaneously. In other words, we can say that Jesus is uncreated, because God is uncreated, and Jesus is God. Yet we can also say that Jesus was born, because of course the human being Jesus of Nazareth was indeed born of Mary. And, indeed, since Jesus is God, and Jesus was born, God was born too. But each of these statements, though they can be made about the unity of Jesus as one person (or hypostasis), only applies to that unity in so far as it is said of the specific “nature” of Jesus that we are referring to—either his divinity or his humanity. So, qua his humanity, Jesus was born, and qua his divinity, Jesus is uncreated. Somehow, both must be true of Jesus Christ the Incarnate Lord, even though “being born” and “being uncreated” are, of themselves, mutually exclusive.

But what is the nature of this language? I’ve already agreed with Troutner that it can’t be equivocal; when we say that Jesus was born, we certainly mean he was born in the regular human way, and when we say that Jesus is divine, we mean he is of the same divinity as God “in general” (in Christian terms, that is, the Trinity in its unity) and of God the Father and God the Spirit in particular. But is this language then univocal? I’m not so sure. When we say that (in so far as Jesus is divine) “God was born of Mary”, do we mean this in exactly the same way as if we say that “Scott Lipscomb was born of Jan”? I don’t think so. God’s having been born of Mary is something that only happened to God as God was incarnate in, through, and as Jesus—that is to say, it “happened to God” via the humanity of Jesus. Jesus, in his humanity, was certainly born of Mary, and by the communicatio idiomatum, then, God was born. But obviously this doesn’t mean that God qua God didn’t “exist” ten months prior to Jesus’s birth, or that the entirety of God somehow passed through Mary’s birth canal in exclusion to being anywhere else. No: even as God was being born of Mary, God was also still utterly transcendent and also completely immanent throughout the whole cosmos, just as God always is.⁵ Whatever it means for God to be born, then, it is quite different (ontologically, metaphysically, etc.) from what it means for us to be born—even though the physical event of that birth was identical to our own.

Obviously, then, the way in which God was born cannot be said to be univocal to the way in which we humans are born—even if cannot be said to be equivocal to the way in which humans are born, either—and this is precisely the kind of situation in which analogical language should be called upon. God’s being born was indeed similar to (and, indeed, from a certain angle, even identical to) the way we humans are born, and yet, and at the same time, it was drastically—even infinitely—different. All of us, like Jesus, were born of a human mother. None of us, also like Jesus, were simultaneously the eternal Creator of all things even as we were being born.

At the heart of the Incarnation, then, is a seeming contradiction that can only be resolved by regarding that contradiction as in fact a paradox, a profound but necessary mystery, the conflict of a thesis and its antithesis that cannot be resolved by subsuming them under, or into, some new thesis. And I think that only analogical language could possibly serve when we want to talk about a paradox. To argue that the two horns of a paradox can be spoken of univocally—to simply identify them with each other, or dialectically collapse them into some new third term—is to deny that the paradox really is a paradox at all—and I think this maneuver would then generate a second contradiction (a paradox which is not a paradox) which cannot then be transformed into a genuine paradox by any reasoning, dialectical or otherwise.⁶

In other words, it seems to me that Christology is actually the prime case for why Christian theological language about God must actually always be analogical. Again, though, when we speak of analogy, we mean analogy, and not equivocation masquerading as analogy. To the extent that Troutner wants to excise any equivocal language from Christology, I will be a stalwart and steadfast ally. However, to the extent that he wants to argue this means that Christological language cannot be analogical and must be univocal, my stalwartness and steadfastness will stand facing the other direction.

But, again, this need to both deny while affirming both equivocity and univocity is precisely why analogical usage arises as important and indeed necessary in all theology. In other words, I believe we must limit ourselves to analogy precisely because only analogical language can possibly convey the basic Christian witness that Jesus is identical both to us and to God.⁷ In this regard, I must disagree with Troutner’s assessment of the limits of analogically theological language:

We defined analogy as a way of understanding the relation between creature and Creator which is pitched between univocity and equivocity, and we specifically laid it down that the sense of analogy in question was one which forbade any talk of “identity.”

Remember, we stipulated that analogy means there is a gap (hiatus, diastema) and that the two realities were neither identical nor absolutely different.

I don’t think this is right. Analogy, instead, allows us to speak of both identity and non-identity at the same time. This, of course, would demand some version of a non-dualist metaphysics (which I see as a feature and not a bug).⁸ The use of analogy does not commit us to a metaphysics of simple non-identity or identity with God (whether we are speaking about Jesus or anyone else). Instead, analogy gives us the both/and, not the neither/nor: we are both identical to God and yet absolutely different from God. It actually allows us to remain open to more and deeper metaphysical options than either univocal or equivocal language could—generally, those we might describe broadly as panentheist (not to be confused with pantheist!), which I might gloss as “God is us, but we are not (the entirety) of God”—a fundamentally intimate but also asymmetrical relation.

(Beyond Merely) Talking About God

Language And Metaphysics

And this brings us to one last important point. There are times when Troutner seems to think that the analogia entis, the “analogy of being” between God and the creation, is itself a metaphysical position. That is, Troutner critiques the requirement to use analogical language, at least in part, because he thinks at least some of his opponents understand analogy as itself a genuine metaphysical relation between God and the world.

This is perhaps most obvious in the way that Troutner tests analogy throughout “Christology: Analogy or Relation?”: he asks whether analogy can be said to govern the relation between Christ’s divinity and humanity:

What you were suggesting is that Christ’s two natures are analogically related to each other, and that their relation in Christ (if analogy is fundamental and unsurpassable) can be explained without going beyond the strictures of analogy.

And a bit later he states:

This means that we would need to spell out the difference between the analogical unity my humanity has with divinity and the analogical unity Christ’s humanity has with his divinity.⁹

It seems clear, then, that Troutner is arguing against a totalizing, metaphysical view of analogy. Now, I can’t speak for every theologian who has employed analogy over the last few millennia,¹⁰ but I certainly want to clarify my own position on this matter.¹¹

As I have been discussing it over these last two posts, analogy must be understood as a method and as a linguistic limitation; that is: analogy is a way we use language, it is a specific mode of the relationship between and (especially) within words as signs. But this is all that it is. Analogy is not itself a metaphysic or even a substantive element of a broader metaphysical position, any more than predicates are somehow a kind of physically real feature of actually existent objects. Rather, the need for analogical language flows from the metaphysical positions we find ourselves having to affirm. (To return to our example from part 1: as we reflect on the doctrine of creation, we find that we must affirm that God is both transcendent and yet immanent, and therefore, we discover that only analogical reference can do justice to this mystery.)

Analogy—as I define and use it—is downstream of metaphysics; it does not determine our metaphysics but is instead determined by our metaphysics. Now, it very well may be that some thinkers have spoken otherwise, either directly arguing that analogy is itself an aspect of proper Christian metaphysics per se, or perhaps simply spoken without sufficient precision, presenting a vague position in which the role of analogy is unclear. In any event, I want to give Troutner the benefit of the doubt here: to the extent that any theologian has actually argued that analogy constitutes some kind of fundamental metaphysical reality unto itself, I would disagree with such a thinker, and agree, at least to a point, with Troutner that reading analogy this deeply into our metaphysics is a mistake.¹²

But, again, I would only do so so that I could immediately insist that, nevertheless, I think good metaphysical reflection still leads to the requirement that our language about God must always be analogical—affirming analogy as an indispensable method. In this regard, I am affirming a certain kind of postmodern (in the good sense!) humility in regards to my own epistemological powers; analogy is a method impressed upon me not because it is “out there” in the metaphysical foundations of God or even the God-world relation, but simply because my language about God is always limited to my own creaturely powers. My language, univocally speaking, can only speak of the creation because I am a creature, a part of the creation. Analogy results from this limit on my knowing and speaking, not because of some inherent analogical limit within God (who, of course, knows no limit whatsoever) or between God and the world—the relationship between which, as I stated last time, is one of both infinite distance but also absolute intimacy—analogy can help denote this paradox, but certainly does not exhaust it. After all, the our analogical reference to God is always from creature to Creator, it is formed by the epistemic limits of the finite creature trying to denote or connote the infinite Creator. I see no reason why God’s reference to us, in the other “direction”, must necessarily be analogical (though, of course, I really can’t know the “nature” of that reference at all, except as I resolve it into my own epistemic framework—returning us back to the requirement for analogy again). This is the asymmetrical nature of the God-world relation in action. The requirement that theological language be analogical is, then, a linguistic delimitation of (human) language, nothing more (or less).

And I think we can see that this must be the way that analogy is used responsibly if we consider whether we could imagine univocity or equivocity being understood as metaphysical facts. It seems clear to me that each of these terms describes the usage of given words—just like analogy— and are not meant to describe independent, fundamental facts about reality. Instead, we might say that each usage flows from specific metaphysical commitments—a pantheist or materialist (or late scholastic nominalist) might insist on univocity of language because they already believe that there is only one mode of being or reality (univocal language results from a certain kind of flatly monist metaphysics). Likewise, someone committed to theological dualism (of either the Reformed or Manichaean type) might insist that our language about God must be equivocal because they have already arrived at that dualist metaphysics (equivocal language results from a sharply divided dualism). And my suggestion that is our usage, and discussion, of analogy must follow the same pattern (analogical language results from an asymmetrically non-dualist “theo-monism”).

Now, again, it may be that my less-extensive view of the anologia entis is not shared by all of its proponents, even some of its famous ones,¹³ and to the extent that Troutner identifies in some of his interlocutors a projection of analogy into God as such, I would agree with him that such a projection is not appropriate, either philosophically or dogmatically. But, again, I would say this only to clarify the way in which I think analogy must still reign over our language about God. And thus, I disagree with the first sentence below, even as I agree with the two that follow directly after it:

In that case, you’re admitting that analogy is not the fundamental or unsurpassable account of the God-world relation. It is not just that it isn’t in Christ; it isn’t anywhere. Analogy itself has no metaphysical content.

I would argue that while, of course, analogy indeed “isn’t anywhere” and has “no metaphysical content”,¹⁴ it nevertheless does provide the “fundamental or unsurpassable account of the God-world relation”. Notice the shift in category here. To speak of the account of something is to speak of our human description of a thing or event: “Fred’s account of the car crash was different than Susy’s”. But to speak of something’s having existence or metaphysical content is to shift to a discussion of how things are “in themselves” (if I may be allowed a stray Kantianism), not our understanding of those things within our own consciousness—even if, of course, our discussion of that existence is still limited by the epistemic apparatus of our particular consciousness. I believe we must be able to distinguish the idea of reality from our perception of it, no matter our epistemological or metaphysical commitments.

This difficulty arises again when Troutner says:

In any case, if you are using analogy in this traditional predicative sense, it seems to me that you haven’t actually excluded anything metaphysically. Maybe you are saying we know that God’s causality is never such as to result in identity or absolute difference, but if we know this, it is by knowing something about God’s causality, not about analogy per se.

This is right, but I don’t think it ends up meaning what Troutner wants it to. When we speak about analogy, I certainly agree that we are speaking not about the very essence of God or even of the God-world relation. Instead, we are reflecting on our own theological method. I think there is fundamentally a slippage here between the epistemological (and linguistic methodological) and the ontological (and metaphysical). The discovery that analogy is not a metaphysical entity is used to argue against the requirement that analogy be always employed in theology. But I don’t think that conclusion follows from that evidence, an error that I think we also see when Troutner says:

It seems to me that once analogy comes unmoored from its original predicative context, such that it is supposed to be directly metaphysical, it becomes sheer assertion, and not even clear assertion at that. This, it seems to me, is a prime example of what Wittgenstein refers to as “language going on holiday.”

But in any case, I think we’ve established that analogy in the sense you are using it has no positive content of its own, and thus it cannot explain or further determine the nature of the hypostatic union in Christ.

This means that there is no such thing as an analogical Christology.

But to the extent that an “analogical Christology” is a Christological position governed by the linguistic discipline of analogy, this seems flatly false, as I hope my arguments above suggest. So, again, to the extent that Troutner is targeting only a “metaphysicalized” analogia entis, a reification of the method of analogy, I may be able to agree with him. But this by no means proves that analogy is not permissible—or even required!—in theological language and discourse.¹⁵

Indeed, I found this sentence, near the very end of the piece, to largely sum up my confusion about precisely what Troutner is aiming at, ultimately:

Is it not simpler to say that Christ is no instance of analogy because analogy is not the whole truth of his Person, any more than it is the truth of the cosmos, the Truth he is?

This is presented as a critique of analogy, but what word could we use to “sum up the whole of the truth of [Christ’s] Person?” Wouldn’t the words “univocity” or even “identity” fail if inserted in that sentence for “analogy”? Surely no single term—and certainly no term as formal and abstract as “analogy”, “univocity”, “equivocity” or “identity”—can capture “the whole truth” of who Jesus (or any of us) is. That’s what proper nouns are for! Even an attempt at an exhaustive description of any person would need to be thousands of words long, not the expression of a single quality—and even then it would only scratch the surface of even the most boring human life. And this leads me to worry that Troutner has shifted the goalposts of this conversation far from any productive discussion of analogy per se.

This post has, perhaps, gotten a bit in the weeds (and has gotten quite long, I am sure you will agree!), but I hope I have made my point clearly. (As I mentioned above, Troutner has now published a part 2 to his “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” series—and also plans to write at least one more part in the future. And as I also said above, nothing in his part 2 substantially changes the points I wanted to make here in responding to the first piece in that series. But, I do plan to write another piece in this series addressing his points in part 2 of his series, and potentially further posts beyond that as well.)

In any event, the conversations in theology will not be complete until we indeed know “face to face”; here and now, looking through the dark glass, all of our arguments must remain provisional.¹⁶

Thanks for reading, and of course, I welcome any comments (constructive, critical, or otherwise) on this important (if complex!) topic.

1. Although I think the importance of analogy to good theology crosses confessional lines, as will become clear, the discussion below will focus on concerns unique to Christians. I do think, though, that what is discussed here has relevance, when properly applied, to other faiths’ discourses as well.

2. As I mentioned last time, Troutner’s piece here is part 1 of a larger series of posts. The piece in question is primarily critical rather than constructive, and so I am speculating a bit on the precise nature of Troutner’s own non-analogical Christological suggestion. I do think that speculation is warranted by the logic he employs in this piece, though.

3. To make a very complex history very simple, the term “Nestorian” is fraught, and is used to refer to a number of related but distinct groups. It seems likely that much of what is today called “Nestorian” entails positions which the historical Nestorius himself did not hold. I use the term here in its common, general sense, but will use scare quotes to point to the uncertainty (to say the least) around its appropriateness.

4. This doctrine was explicitly confirmed at the Council of Ephesus.

5. Attempting to say that somehow the Logos was limited to the body of Jesus at this time, while the Father and Spirit were not, won’t help us, because Trinitarian thought has always insisted that every divine act is an act of all three “persons”. When the Logos acts, the Logos acts at the direction of the Father and in the unity of the Spirit. We cannot split these three off from each other like the pieces of Voltron.

6. This comment Troutner made in reference to Zizek’s The Monstrosity of Christ does suggest that he may believe dialectic can displace paradox in theology. I think this is wrong—and the errors of this approach are evident in Zizek’s text itself—but that is a topic for another time.

7. And to put this in Christological terms: good Christology actually requires a sense of a “gap” between God and the world because it is precisely this gap that we believe Jesus crosses in order to save and divinize us. The identity of God and humanity in the world is precisely an identity suspended across the real difference between us, even as that (re)identification may indeed be simply the repair of a past breach. But if there is no gap between us and God, then what are we even talking about? What is sin? What problem does the Cross solve? How and why is Jesus the Savior of anything?

8. I don’t know Troutner’s views on non-dualism in general but it seems like the kind of position that he would at least be open to.

9. As an aside, I am puzzled by Troutner’s attempts to understand an analogical relation between “divinity” and “humanity” here. Analogy, after all, is generally a way of relating different meanings of the same word, not a way of trying to determine the relation between different words (the meanings of which, after all, are generally equivocal to one another on purpose). I’m genuinely not sure what it would mean to define an analogical relation between my humanity and divinity. Which word is being deployed analogically here?

10. Along with Aquinas, Troutner also mentions Pryzwara and critiques his views. I have read Aquinas on analogy in the Summa, but have not (yet!) read Pryzwara’s Analogia Entis. Troutner also cites von Balthasar in the latter part of of “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” (part 1), but though I have read some Balthasar, I haven’t read the specific texts he cites. So, I will not address Troutner’s discourse on Pryzwara and Balthasar here. It’s important to note that even if Troutner’s critique does apply to e.g. Pryzwara, Troutner in this piece is not only targeting Pryzwara’s thought, but analogy in general. This means that his argument needs to succeed against a much broader set of ideas than Pryzwara’s alone.

11. In “Christology: Analogy or Identity?” (part 1), Troutner is certainly aware of the various ways that analogy can be understood or applied, and specifically that it can have either a purely linguistic or a fuller metaphysical reference:

"Second, what exactly do you mean by analogy? ... Not that these are entirely unrelated, but are we talking about how our language works, or doing fundamental metaphysics? And everybody has their own version, and they differ profoundly."

and, later, he says:

“So let’s be clear. When analogy is used in the traditional sense of predication, what analogy excludes is clear: univocity or equivocity in terms of semantic meaning or mode of signification. These are excluded by virtue of what the analogical mode of signification is (there’s an identifiable three-term disjunction). If we want to speak of the metaphysics of the situation or specify concretely the mode of signification, we do not think harder about “analogy; rather, we proceed to an account of the analogates and the causal relations between them.”

However, Troutner identifies the view of analogy he seems to be opposing as simply metaphysical:

"...analogy was the shape of the relationship between God and the world. Analogy is fundamental and unsurpassable."

One also gets the sense that Troutner identifies the view he is opposing as this metaphysical meaning of analogy in statements such as the following, which I also quoted above in the main text of this post:

“What you were suggesting is that Christ’s two natures are analogically related to each other, and that their relation in Christ (if analogy is fundamental and unsurpassable) can be explained without going beyond the strictures of analogy.”

This language of analogy being the relation of Christ’s natures to each other, I think, clearly goes beyond the linguistic meaning of analogy. I do think this clarifies Troutner’s own argument by helping us so precisely what his target is. Again, though, I worry this amounts to Troutner rejecting only one of the weaker versions of the pro-analogy position.

12. I made this point in a comment thread with Andrew Kuiper which you can read here.

13. though I certainly think that e.g. Aquinas locates its within human language and not beyond

14. I think it must be admitted that “univocity” and “equivocity” also have no metaphysical content in themselves and are also “not anywhere”.

15. I think David Bentley Hart provides deeper reflection on this point in his The Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 182-187. Hart suggests there that Trinitarian thought commits Christians to believing that, in God, identity and difference—unity and multiplicity—are somehow joined utterly together, that God must be understood as both identical to and yet different even from Godself. Here, then, univocity and equivocity are both affirmed and then yet sublimated, so to speak, into analogy. And indeed, Hart does suggest that there is something fundamentally analogical about God on p. 186, but only because this fundamental metaphysical identity-in-difference has been discovered. (At least, this is how I understand him here.) Again: analogy is a human linguistic strategy employed because of the profound paradoxical mystery of God. To say that God is Three in One is to both affirm God’s oneness and threeness, but also to then insist on God’s non-oneness and non-threeness. Neither univocity or equivocity could capture this. Thus, we use analogy.

16. 1 Corinthians 13:12, NRSV: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”