One alternative is to maintain that language about God is univocal--in other words language about God is to be understood in broadly the same way as language about human beings. The problem with this is that God must then be in time and one would be thinking of a God in time (some Catholic liberation theologians take this view as well as many Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists).

   A God in time has advantages from the point of view of language about God, but there is a heavy price to pay as God then becomes subject to time and change and some would then maintain that such a God is too limited.

   It can also lead to an anthropomorphic view of God as, if God is in time, God can also be in space. This then raises questions about where God is.
The timeless and spaceless view of God, however, maintains God's transcendence at the price of God being almost completely unknowable.

[This article appeared in the Catechist Newsletter published by Brisbane Catholic Education.]


[Comments: Urantia Paper #2 "The Nature of God" informs us that, "the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth." (33) The book also says, "Although Jesus revealed the true nature of the heavenly Father in his earth life, he taught little about him. In fact, he taught only two things: that God in himself is spirit, and that, in all matters of relationship with his creatures, he is a Father."

   The gospel of John (14:9) reports Jesus as saying words such as, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." and in 14:11, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me." Christianity generally has a firm belief in the divinity of Jesus, so combined with the evidence from John's gospel, it is difficult to conceive how the life of Jesus can be interpreted in any other way than as a revelation of the nature of God--
which means that there are things we can know about God.

   Thus it appears that the 13th century re-discovery of Aristotelian logic in the Western world, and its subsequent application to Christian theology, may have had enormous deleterious effects on the progressive spiritualization of Christians]

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