able to say about divine knowledge, intentions, desires, tendencies, and so on. What is
left over is left to the realm of the inexplicit “pointing in a certain direction,” to use
Crombie's way of putting it, or to metaphorical, symbolic, model-dependent speech. It is
no accident that Jesus, when asked by his disciples how to pray, did not begin his answer:
“Say `Thou who are the source of the being of everything other than himself, in
something like the way in which a human father is the source of the being of his
offspring' ” Instead, he unselfconsciously made a metaphorical use of the term “father.”
That is itself a “parable” of our need to go beyond partial univocity in religious discourse,
even if that is as viable as I take it to be.
end p.242
NOTES
1.For a thorough discussion of this, see Heimbeck (1969).
2.Just as all this discussion of reference is conducted without assuming that God exists,
so the discussion of experience of God does not assume that what seems like that to the
subject is veridical percepton, only that it is, phenomenologically, a case of perception,
what seems to the subject like perception.
3.Of course, the partial univocity position itself implies an analogy between divine and
human properties, but I reserve the term “analogical” here for a view that denies the
possibility of an explicit literal formulation of the points of analogy.
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