DOGMATICS I NUMBER 33 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> So the idea of analogical language applies to words like "love, just and good," not to words like "rock" or "fortress," right? >> Right. Rock and fortress are metaphors. They illustrate a certain aspect of how God relates to us. And if taken literally, they would be misleading. That God is a rock does not mean that he is inanimate or that he cannot move, but it points to one aspect of the rock, that he is enduring, that he is reliable, like that -- like a house built on a rock, and gains -- and thereby gains stability. So we relying on God gain stability, internal stability. The same is true for "fortress." It's a metaphor illustrating in one sense what God is like. He protects me like the fortress protects those who seek refuge in it. Rock and fortress again can be replaced by other metaphors, like "foundation," or "safe place," or by an abstract concept like "protection." But again God is not something like good, but He truly is good and we cannot replace the word "good" with any other word. He is truly love, and it would be rather fatal to view that just as a figure of speech. Love can really be said of God, whereas rock has always to be understood metaphorically in a nonliteral sense. But he is literally though analogically love. So, analogical language talks about God's attributes, how he is. Regarding metaphors, we can come up with new metaphors for God. Once we have a concept of what God is like and how he relates to this world, we might express this relationship of God in new metaphors. Why do we do that? Why do we come up with new metaphors? Well, that can be either because biblical metaphors are very remote from our world, some of them at least are because they talk about essentially agricultural society. When we call God our shepherd, that has to be explained, for example, to kids that grow up in an urban setting and never have seen a shepherd nor a sheep. You first have to give them the visual image. Whereas when you grow up in the country and have sheep yourself and see shepherds, that's directly understandable. Sometimes metaphors have to be translated, like the early missionaries to the Inuit translated: Lamb of God, because in Greenland, after all, you don't have lambs, and thus Inuit didn't have any idea about what a lamb is. So they said well, what kind of conveys the same image? And they settled for "little seal." New metaphors for God can also be created because we want to have new illustrations. In that sense, there is something poetic, also, about the way we speak about God. Poetic not in the sense that we now make poems, but that we actually find new ways to speak about God. Luther, for example, once said that God is a furnace burning with love. That's not a biblical image, but he wanted to illustrate the concept that God is love through and through. When we look for new metaphors, then we have to be careful. The example that Jesus as the lamb of God was translated as little seal might evoke the notion that Jesus is innocent. But of course it falls short in some other respects. That is that lamb, of course, is connected with the entire sacrificial cultus. It is the sacrificial animal. And that means we cannot simply translate every and any metaphor into our present world. Also, in regards to metaphors, not only in regard to analogical language, but also in regard to metaphors, we have to learn the biblical language. Because a translation would also be somewhat inadequate. And if you translate all the connotations that a metaphor has, then it would be rather long and tedious. So to understand what is meant by Jesus, lamb of God, you have to hear about the sacrificial causes, you have to hear about the concept of sacrifice. And once you understand that, you will understand also God in Christ better. So it's part of our task to teach people the biblical language so that they acquire this kind of vocabulary. When we invent new metaphors, then we also have to be careful that we don't do anything that is rather grotesque or misleading. One I quite vividly remember because of the metaphor used in it. He talked about Jesus being the socket, us being an electrical appliance, and then the plug is faith. That was so bad I still remember it more than ten years after that. It's just very awkward, and you think what in faith -- what does he mean by that and Jesus a socket? So, you see, to invent new metaphors in a certain way you have to be a poet. You have to have a feel for the language. So be careful. Also, we should have respect for the biblical language because, after all, it's God's language about himself. He has hallowed these metaphors. So the metaphors of scripture should take precedence over our inventions. This is the closest way we get to God. Another danger when we invent metaphors is that we leave, we leave the pattern of scripture, that we invent metaphors that are only partly true or half false or totally false. We have to remember that all human beings and also the Christians are still afflicted of sin, and that sin distorts our ability to really know what God is. That's why we constantly have to recheck our language, how we talk about God, what we say about God, against the pattern of Holy scripture. The human heart is a factory of idols and one very subtle way to fabricate idols is to find supposedly new and better metaphors for God. Because, well, a lot of things, they are old fashioned or they are not sophisticated for you. It is part of Christian humility that we follow the sometimes seemingly so simple speech pattern of Holy Scripture, the sometimes so seemingly simple metaphors, trusting that because God has chosen them they actually have an inherent power which is better than anything we can invent. So all our talk about God can go in a certain respect beyond the metaphors of scripture. But it should always lead back --