Let me try to be clearer. I am asserting:
1. That much confusion in religious discourse is caused by failure to distinguish clearly between literal and metaphorical/poetic language
2. That use of metaphorical/poetic language is necessary in religious discourse because we can’t understand these ideas any other way
3. That religion is an extreme case of our problems in understanding anything complex or conceptual without using metaphors or pictures
4. That much of the persuasive power of religion comes precisely from its use of metaphor/poetic discourse; we believe because it is beautiful
I think you accept the first proposition, though my examples were not very helpful (I won’t give up the day job). Perhaps a better example of the importance of looking carefully at whether literal or metaphorical language is being used is the various interpretations of ‘this is my body … this is my blood… do this in remembrance of me’. The lethal disagreements over transubstantiations and the real presence are at least at one level precisely about whether Jesus’ words are to be taken literally or as metaphor. In this case the metaphorical usage seems to make perfect sense – the bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ – and this isn’t totally different to my son wanting to play football in a Leeds United or a Real Madrid shirt. It’s symbolism and identification, with just a hint of sympathetic magic. On the other hand, the claim that the substance of the bread and wine is transformed in a way beyond human comprehension into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ is totally beyond me.
Yes, obviously the disagreement here is over whether the words should be understood literally or metaphorically. However, I'm not convinced by what you say about it. First, it seems to me that a literal meaning is perfectly comprehensible. I have no difficulty whatsoever in understanding the claim that, in the Mass, the bread and wine are transformed into the real body and real blood of Jesus, although their perceptible properties remain exactly the same. Of course I don't think that that actually happens, but I understand the claim that it does. Second, even if I couldn't understand the literal sense, that wouldn't in itself rule it out as the correct interpretation. Just because I can't understand something, that doesn't mean that this wasn't the original intention. Perhaps whoever formulated the doctrine understood the world in a very different way from me. In the case of the words of institution, I don't know whether there's much chance of determining - as a purely historical question - what Jesus meant by them, even assuming he said them in the first place. However, it seems plausible to me to suppose that the literal/metaphorical disjunction doesn't exhaust all the ranges of meaning available to a first-century Jew. Remember that this was said at a Passover meal (on the Synoptic timing, anyway - John thinks the Last Supper was not a Passover meal, but then he doesn't have the words of institution), where Jews believed (and, as far as I know, still do believe) that they become really identified in some more-than-purely-metaphorical but still less-than-entirely-literal way with their forefathers who participated in the Exodus. The notion of "symbol" was much richer and more real to the ancient mind than it is to the modern one. If we say that something is meant symbolically, we normally mean to draw attention to the
difference between the symbol and the thing symbolised - but in antiquity, the intent would have been to draw attention to the
similarity or even, in some sense, the identity.
I digress slightly, but this leads on to my second proposition. Religious language has to be metaphorical because it is talking about subjects beyond our comprehension. ‘God is a non-physical person’ – how are we supposed to understand this? ‘God sees everything’ – again, what can this mean? How does something without eyeballs see?
I don't really follow the argument. Yes, if we say God sees something, then it seems that we must be speaking metaphorically
if we think that the literal meaning of "see" refers to physical vision. So almost everyone would agree that there's metaphor being used there. But because we understand what the statement means, we can rephrase it non-metaphorically - e.g. "God knows everything that happens". The very fact that the original statement
has meaning allows us to cash it out in a literal statement. So I don't see how this is evidence that religious language
has to be metaphorical.
And I don't understand why the other example you give has to be understood metaphorically at all. "God is a non-physical person" seems to me to have a perfectly plain literal meaning: God is a person, that is, a rational individual, and he is not physical, that is, he is not extended in space like corporeal objects. I think I understand that perfectly well. Whether it describes a true situation is of course another matter.
A statement can be literally true without being exhaustively true, of course. It may be that God transcends our reason and we cannot really understand anything about him, but I don't see why
that in itself means we can't say anything literally true about him. We could, at the very least, say that he transcends our reason and we can't understand him, and that would be literally true. We could of course also say many things that are literally true of God if we restrict ourselves to what he isn't (e.g. "God is not a stone" is surely literally true, at least if you're not a pantheist of some kind).
For when we speak of God and that He sees everything, and when we kneel and pray to Him, all our terms and actions seem to be part of a great and elaborate allegory which represents Him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win, etc, etc. ...Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be a simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first seemed to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics 1929).
So he says anyway! But why believe this? Why suppose that there are literally
no facts about things like God? It would follow from this that the statement "God exists" and "God does not exist" are actually saying exactly the same thing, and each is equally true (or untrue, or in fact, meaningless). Now Wittgenstein did think that, and so did the members of the Vienna Circle who were influenced by him, and other logical positivists such as A.J. Ayer. But these views are widely rejected by philosophers today for a number of reasons, including the fact that they lead to conclusions that are surely absurd. Surely there
is a difference between saying that God exists and that God doesn't exist.
Of course this isn’t just an issue with Christianity, but of any attempt to utter true propositions about anything transcendent. ‘The other world’, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ is beyond space and time – how can we know whether propositions about it are true or false?
That's a different issue, though. Whether or not we can know a statement to be true doesn't have any bearing on whether it has a literal meaning,
pace the logical positivists. Moreover, I don't see how this supports the claim that all religious language is metaphorical. Let's agree that we can never know the truth value of statements about the kingdom of heaven taken literally. Well, how can we know the truth value of statements about the kingdom of heaven taken metaphorically? Indeed, if they're metaphorical, their meaning is less clear. Doesn't that make it
even harder to know whether they are true or false?
Even metaphors don’t really work because, as you say (and Wittgenstein says, above) you have to be able to cash in a metaphor. Hence, although linguistically ‘The Lamb of Christ’ is a metaphor, it actually functions theologically, as you say, like a myth, an allegory or a picture.
Right! So it's not a metaphor. It's a mythological symbol. That's not the same thing. That may be a niggle though - the key point is that, in my view, not
all religious language is of this kind.
I think you accepted my last point, and it isn’t very controversial. However, I must pick you up on one point. You say ‘you are right that religious discourse has non-cognitive aspects, which are part of its power’. Actually I’m explicitly not describing the metaphorical and poetic parts of religious discourse as non-cognitive – my point is that they are (necessarily) part of the way we actually understand the world, how we know things, hence are very cognitive!
Fair enough - when I say "cognitive" I mean containing some kind of intelligible content that can be expressed propositionally. That is, factual (or apparently factual) claims about how the world actually is.
I have been advised to read a book by Janet Soskice called ‘Metaphor and Religious Language’ which addresses these issues. Have you come across it?
I think I've come across it but I haven't read it.
I asked this awhile ago, and you never answered:
Do you see any sweeping trends or patterns in the history of religion or does it seem more like one damn divinity after another?
I thought I did answer this - apologies if not. I would say that I don't know enough about the history of religion in general to answer. I think that some kinds of trends seem to repeat themselves - for example, polytheism tending to develop into some kind of monotheism, and monotheism tending to splinter into something resembling a functional polytheism - but these are only very rough generalisations. I think history is too dependent upon contingent particulars for there to be really repeatable trends, or to put it another way, any Seldon plan will inevitably founder at the hands of innumerable Mules.
What is the scholarly opinion on the likelihood of Peter being the first Bishop of Rome?
There's no good early evidence that Peter had much to do with Rome - all the New Testament references to him put his centre of activities in Jerusalem, with James. However, there is also no good evidence that he
didn't go to Rome and act as a Christian leader there, and really there's no particular reason to doubt this or the tradition that he died in Rome in the mid-60s, together with Paul, during Nero's persecution.
Whether that would make him
bishop of Rome is another matter and really depends on what you mean by "bishop". The monarchical episcopate - the system in which a church in a given city was ruled by a single bishop, assisted by various priests and deacons - had not really emerged in the 60s of the first century, and only gradually developed over the following decades, at a different pace in different places. In fact there is some evidence that it developed particularly slowly in Rome, making it hard to talk about "the bishop" of Rome at any point before the end of the
second century. In the late second century, for example, we are told that the modalist Noetus was examined by a panel of "presbyters" who expelled him from the church, implying that even at that late stage the Roman church was ruled by a group rather than by a single person. (The disputes between Callistus and Hippolytus a decade or two later may reflect something similar, perhaps tensions caused by the transition from a presbyterian model of leadership to an episcopal one, but that's just speculation.) So to call anyone before the end of the second century "the bishop of Rome" is probably to use the title at least in an anachronistic way. If Peter was "bishop of Rome" in any sense, it was in the sense of being a major figure in the church there - perhaps, in the absence of any other apostles in the city, the leader of the Christians there - but we shouldn't suppose that he had any special titles or anything at the time in virtue of this.
Or, for that matter, Apostolic succession?
You'll have to say more precisely what you mean by that.
If this is so, then why am I not religious?
I don't know. You tell me! But why's it relevant? You're not most people, are you?
If you say I'm not religious, then why couldn't society end up beign sort of like me?
I didn't say it
couldn't, merely that it very probably won't. The reason is that that just isn't the way that people, taken collectively, work. Of course for any generalisation you make about human beings there will be exceptions. Most human beings want to have children, but some don't. Most human beings think it important to act in at least a minimally thoughtful way towards others, but some don't. Most human beings dislike pain, but some don't. And so on and so forth. Anyone who is unusual in any of these ways or any other might ask why people in general aren't like that, or what's to stop people in general from becoming like that, but it's a futile question. That's just not how people are. Now some such generalisations can change over history, of course. But I don't see any reason to think that human beings, as a whole, are becoming any less religious than they used to be, or indeed any more religious. It seems to me to have been pretty much a constant pretty much always. Of course it's hard to tell, partly because we might disagree over what counts as being "religious". One might say, for example, that in certain twentieth-century societies, ways of thinking or acting that would in the past have been expressions of religious thinking instead occurred in a secular context - for example, devotion to the Communist cause in the Soviet Union or something like that. But that would just be an argument about how to classify things. I think that if you really believed there is a good chance of people in general ceasing to be religious you'd have to come up with some very good evidence for the claim.
