Bad Faithpoint here would be that all religious language is metaphorical,
in keeping with the insight that God is radically unknowable,
and there are various strategies that religious language deploys
to underline its metaphorical nature. Sometimes negative lan-
guage is used. For example, God may be said to be ‘immortal’ or
‘ invisible’ – that is, not mortal and not visible, with the emphasis
on the not. Alternatively, when positive statements about God
are used, they should never occur in isolation, but should be set
alongside other statements that unsettle any direct inferences.
For example, when God is called ‘Lord’, it is quite clear that he
is not a lord in any usual sense – dressed in ermine or lording
it over an estate – but that the word is metaphorically trying to
express something of God’s authority or power. Similarly, when
God is called Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the idea is to convey
insights in the way that God is manifest to human beings, at
least as the Christian tradition sees it. The emphasis, again, is
on the way God is manifest to human beings – that is, though
divinely inspired, this is human language about God. What
God is in Godself is as mysterious as ever. As the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rowan Williams, put it in a lecture entitled ‘What
Is Christianity?’, at the international Islamic University in
Islamabad: ‘When we speak of “the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit”, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods –
as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human
people in a room.’
The Archbishop’s thought must be right. However, it is one
thing to say that technically speaking the doctrine of the Trinity
does not include the idea that there are three gods. But it is
another thing entirely for the language to take the individual
beyond the idea that God is literally Father or Lord. I can only
speak from experience, but I doubt whether many Christians
think that, or would even think it right to think that. Most
think of God as a Father, as Lord.
The modern use of religious language has sidelined God the
question – in favour of more accessible notions of the divine.
Further, this, I suspect, is part of a general historical shift in