Robert Masson

Analogy and Metaphoric Process

The author argues that the dispute between Elizabeth Johnson and Joseph Bracken about the doctrine of God is rooted in a disagreement about how we know and speak of God. The difference is characterized as a choice between one view that sees theologys task as finding appropriate analogies for conceiving God and another view governed by the assumption that a more fundamental metaphoric shift in thinking and speaking is required. This article clarifies what is at issue by analyzing other conceptions of analogy in the light of a specific theory of metaphoric process.

Interpreting Rahner's Metaphoric Logic

Recent provocative reinterpretations of Karl Rahners theology illustrate the hermeneutical challenge of retrieving his achievement for a new era. The spectrum of positions is exemplified by Karen Kilby, Patrick Burke, and Philip Endean. The essay proposes an alternative interpretive scheme attentive to Rahners metaphoric logic.

Conceiving God: Literal and Figurative Prompt for a More Tectonic Distinction

Abstract John Sanders’ Theology in the Flesh, the first comprehensive overview of the toolkit that contemporary cognitive linguistics offers for theological appropriation, despite its remarkable success, gives rather minimal attention to blending theory, one of the discipline’s most formidable tools. This paper draws on blending theory to offer an alternative to Sanders’ chapter on conceiving God. Central to the proposal is claim that God-talk, like many of the advances in science, technology, and art, entails a kind of tectonic understanding and conceptual mapping that is neither literal nor figurative.

Are Aquinas and Whitehead Metaphorical and Analogical All the Way Down

Abstract The paper argues from the perspective of a significant strand of interpretation of Aquinas and from insights in cognitive linguistics that a fruitful dialogue between Whitehead and Thomism needs to take into account that metaphysics and talk about God are metaphorical and analogical all the way down. Cognitive linguistics provides an explanatory scheme for explaining how Aquinas’s tectonic use of analogy shifts the ground of our conventional fields of meanings to create space to conceptualize what otherwise would be beyond grasp and to make inferences possible that otherwise would be unthinkable. The essay concludes with a question, admittedly from a particular trajectory of Thomism and cognitive linguistics, about whether Whitehead’s conception of God adequately accounts for the radically metaphorical “imaginative leap” entailed in the Christian conception of God.