Today we conclude our discussion on the difficulty of talking about God. After noting in part 1 that attempts to speak about God were hard, and that our language about God was often rather weird, last week, in part 2, we explored two approaches to talking about God that seemed to have promise: analogy and apophasis. (If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 yet, I recommend you do before continuing!)

At the end of part 2, we found ourselves in a strange place: we found we could talk about God through analogical statements and also through apophatic (negative) statements, though each have their limits. But this results in a strange situation: we can say both that, for example, “God is a mother” (so long as we mean this analogically!) and also “God is not a mother”. But how can this be? In saying this, are we in violation of the law of non-contradiction?

As I said at the outset of part 1: talking about God is weird, and talking about God is hard. To see how it could be the case that God both is and is not a mother (or anything else), let’s employ some more analogy.

Click here to keep reading on my substack: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/p/beyond-merely-talking-about-god