Overview

The longstanding debate over how God-talk is intelligible gravitates around how we should understand the putative answer, “by analogy.” For some contemporary Christian theologians, analogy involves an ontological claim about creaturely and divine being (i.e., an analogy of being). For others, it involves a semantic or syntactical structure that legitimates the linguistic performances associated with analogy (i.e., a grammatical analogy). Still others appeal to faith in God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ (i.e., an analogy of faith). Rory Misiewicz argues that all of these approaches fall flat in their explanatory efforts. He draws upon the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to rethink the relation between God and human beings. He argues that Christian theologians may view that relation as being established by an “analogy of signs”: both God and human beings are univocally involved in semiosis, or sign-process, and the confirmation of God’s semiotic identity is found in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. Therefore, ordinary analogical language is intelligible, for divine signs are commensurate with human signs.

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9781978710023

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Rory Misiewicz has produced a fine comparison of Thomas Aquinas's analogy of faith and Charles S. Peirce's analogy of signs. This is first-rate Peirce scholarship and adds to our growing knowledge of Peirce's later work. It takes a worthy place among scholarship sponsored by Short's Peirce's Theory of Signs. It is especially good in explicating Peirce's strange, conservative, view of God. -- Robert Cummings Neville, Boston University, emeritus

Author Information

Rory Misiewicz (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) teaches humane letters at Philadelphia Classical School (PA).

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