ANALOGY MYTH AND SYMBOLISM   The Dominican monk, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thought that it was indeed possible to talk about God in a meaningful way. He isolated three forms of language. Univocal, equivocal and analogy. Univocal means that the same word had a very similar meaning no matter what the context might be. It is possible to talk about the love of a father and the love of God as a father. Although the situations are very different, univocal language implies that the general meaning is the same. The objection to this is that many would say that the two uses of love are not the same thing at all. Human love is fallible and one might love a father despite his weaknesses. The same would not apply to the concept of God. Equivocal is the second form of language. Here the same word is used in two different ways eg swallow. "He swallowed the tablet" and "The swallow emerged and flew away." Or duck. " As the plane flew low over the house, everyone ducked" and "The duck swam across the pond." Interesting as this sort of communication might be, especially for foreigners, it had no application in terms of speaking meaningfully about God. Analogy Aquinas appears to use two forms of analogy to describe God. Analogy of proportion, which describes God’s power and analogy of attribution to speak about God’s qualities such as goodness etc. With analogy, the same word is used eg love. Once again we can take the phrases used earlier Love of a father Love of God Analogy recognises that there is some similarity, but it is not quite the same thing. The one is a working model of the other. I am sitting in front of a computer. I could also claim the brain is a computer. (Clearly of course it is not, but I use the analogy so that another person might understand my explanation of the brain) Returning to the idea of love Aquinas would want to say that we refer to the love of a father because our ideas derive ultimately from God in the first place (it is worth bearing in mind that, for Aquinas, causes and their effects are intimately connected… look back on your notes on the cosmological argument to remind yourself of this.) We tend to think of this the other way round. We feel we know how terms apply in the world about us, but cannot know exactly how such concepts apply to God. E Mascall suggested that it is a matter of proportionality. To say "an apple is good" is different from saying "a human being is good." Goodness can be applied to apples, people or God in terms of reference proportional to apples, people or God. I T Ramsey suggested that language required "models" or "qualifiers" So to speak of God as good means that we need to qualify it in some way eg by saying it is "infinite" or "unending." Whereas my apple is only good "at the moment"   MYTH A popular understanding of "myth" is that it is a story that is not factual. For religious studies and anthropology, myth is much more than a nonfactual story. Myths serve a very special purpose. Myths are sacred stories and are not simply stories from long ago or entertainment. Myths may tell a story of long ago, or why something happened, or why such and such is the way it is. They usually use quite metaphorical language and have a multitude of meanings, from the surface level to a very deep spiritual level. An Old Testament scholar would describe the stories in Genesis 1-11 as myths. They are sacred stories which attempt to explain why God created the universe the way it is. These stories contain primitive cosmology. In reality though they say much more than that. They are an explanation about fundamental human characteristics – eg sin, childbirth, man’s need to work, his quest for immortality, why people like to wear clothes, why snakes are regarded my many as threatening etc etc Every culture and religion has its myths and it is clear that in many parts of the world there has been much cultural borrowing. Some of the Old Testament myths seem to have been derived from Babylonian and Sumerian sources. Myth, symbol and ritual are very interconnected in religious studies. The New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann 1884-1976 believed that an understanding of Jesus’ depended upon demythologising the gospel narratives. In order to understand the "Christ experience" one had to cut away the first century myths – the contexts in which Jesus’ life was described. Twentieth century man needed to understand Jesus in twentieth century terms and it was difficult for him to do this if the language, events and points of reference belonged to the firth century AD. The existential impact of Jesus depends on faith, not on history. Bultmann regarded many, if not most of the events of Jesus’ life as myths. He saw the resurrection not as an event in history, but as a miracle of faith in the lives of the disciples. Not all of Bultmann’s pupils have followed close in their master’s footsteps, but the scholar highlighted the need to be aware of the continuing importance of myth in the transmission of religious ideas. It is not necessarily only a primitive medium of communication restricted to the beginnings of culture. SYMBOL A symbol is concrete, but represents something more. Dove, represents what? Religions, spiritual paths all have many forms of art, music, dance, drama, etc. but it is not done just for art. Symbols of religion are represented through art, music, architecture, writing, and stories. Some examples would be the cross for Christians, a crucifix for Catholic Christians, a Star of David for Jews. Here though we are concerned with the idea of symbols in language. Ideas about God may expressed in terms of symbolism . They may help to explain difficult concepts. For many Christians the bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus. The help the believer to grasp ideas that are almost unreachable. P Tillich claimed that all religious language is symbolic, with the exception of the statement "God is being in itself". In his Systematic Theology he states that all religious language is symbolic of the idea that God is our ultimate concern. "Symbols," he believed "unlock dimensions and elements of our souls.