This chapter is the last chapter about the four principles of knowledge. Here we study the analogical use of language and its necessity in understanding God.
This chapter has a lot of historical information that I won't get into. The main point of it all is that there were theologians who, in trying to counter the ideas of pantheism (God is all things and all things are God), argued that God was absolutely and completely "other," totally separate from our universe. Indeed it's true that He is separate, but this caused a crisis: if God is completely separate, then we can't know or say anything about Him because there are no similarities between Him and us. There is nothing we can do to understand Him because He is absolutely different from His creation.
Well, Biblically, that's not true. In Genesis 1:26 we read that "God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.'" We are made in the image of God! We can talk about God because there is similarity between us and Him. Indeed, there is some degree of similarity between God and His created order; as Sproul said in his teaching series Recovering the Beauty of the Arts: since God is the ultimate source of goodness, truth, and beauty, then everything good, true, and beautiful displays some aspect of the glory of God.
The idea of analogical language seems to have come from a man named Thomas Aquinas. He differentiated between univocal language (two uses of a word mean the exact same thing), equivocal language (two uses of a word mean two completely different things), and analogical language (two uses of a word are similar but not the exact same). Analogical language is a middle ground of sorts. When we say "This coffee smells good" and "God is good," we are being analogical. The coffee may smell good, but God is exceedingly better. But some of His goodness is reflected in the smell of that coffee. When we say "God is omnipotent (all-powerful)," we must draw an analogy because we have never seen omnipotence. But we can look at someone with power or at our own exertions of power and draw an inference of what omnipotence means.
This chapter didn't seem to be arguing so much for the use of analogical language in general so much as it was arguing for its use in describing and talking about God, but I can't see a Biblical warrant for not using such language. Actually, it seems completely necessary. And if we are talking about the God of the Bible, we already know that He is somewhat similar to His creation. I guess then we'd have to prove the validity of the Bible. But we'll get to that.
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