Anthropomorphism and analogy

Andrew Wilson has a lovely little post up using Herman Bavinck's work to show the "unlimited" scope of the Bible's use of anthropomorphism to talk about God. It's a helpful catalogue of the sheer volume and range of scriptural language to describe God and God's action. It's a useful resource, too, for helping students to grasp the notion that most of our speech about God is metaphorical, all of it is analogical, and none of it is less true for that.

In my experience not only students but philosophers and theologians as well often imagine, argue, or take for granted that doctrine is a kind of improvement on the language of Scripture. The canon then functions as a kind of loose rough draft, however authoritative, upon which metaphysically precise discourse improves, or at least by comparison offers a better approximation of the truth. Sometimes those parts of the canon that are literal or less anthropomorphic are permitted some lexical or semantic control. But in any case the idea is that arriving at non-metaphorical and certainly non-anthropomorphic language is the ideal.

But this is a mistake. Anthropomorphism is not an error or an accommodation to avoid. It's the vehicle of truth, the sanctified means of truthful talk about God. It may in principle speak more truly about God than its contrary. And Scripture's saturation in it would suggest that in fact it is God's chosen manner of communicating with us, and thus a privileged discursive mode for talk about God.

The upshot: theological accounts of analogy and language about God are meant not to sit in judgment on Scripture but rather to show how Scripture's language about God works. It is meant to serve the canon and to ground trust in canonical idiom, not to qualify it. "Given divine transcendence and the character of human language, how is what the Bible says about God true?" is the question to which the doctrine of analogy is an answer. Analogy does not mitigate the truth of Scripture's witness. It is a way of establishing it philosophically.

So that when the Bible says God has a face or arms or nostrils, or has wrath or grief or regret or love, or knows or forgets or begets or weds, the Christian is right to hear it as what it is: the word of God, trustworthy and true.