Michael Jensen’s comment on one of the posts below prompted me to think about this a bit more, by means of an analogy or example or two.
Do analogies prove anything?
Perhaps not. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be interesting, helpful and suggestive.
However, it is possible to imagine analogies so deep and prevalent that they amount to making a case.
For example, if baptism is like circumcision in many many ways and circumcision is given to children, one might think that baptism is likely to be given to children too.
An analogy might suggest a pattern of thinking and an expectation. It might suggest a burden of proof.
One might expect, for example, to see specific confirmation of women’s baptisms since they might not seem so obvious as children’s baptisms given that baptism is the new circumcision.
Maybe its even true to say something like all thinking, arguing and speaking is analogical. Certainly all God-talk is.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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2 comments:
trouble is, we love patterns so much that we are easily misled by them. A classic case is the christological analogy applied to Scripture: one's view of scripture is called 'Docetic' or whatever other Christological heresy suits. But scripture is divine and human in ways precisely NOT like the Son of God was, and using the analogy from christology obscures this. (I got this pretty much from John Webster).
Yes, I certainly agree with your first sentance. It is easy to see connections that dont exist and that way madness lies, but that doesnt change the fact that everything is related and there are deep patterns reflecting God's wise design in accord with his nature.
I think there are uses to the X / Scripture analgoy - eg to say that something can be both human and divine, though obviously there are difference between X and the Bible (eg no hypostatic union in Bible, as Warfield points out). It is after all an analogy not a univocal identity.
Sure: analogies can be used as abuse terms but they can also be helpful illustrations.
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