Without Metaphor, No Saving God
Theology after Cognitive Linguistics
by R. Masson
Studies of conceptual and neural mapping in cognitive linguistics, while posing a fundamental challenge for religious belief, also suggest new ways of understanding how people conceptualize God and make theological inferences. This book, inspired by that research and attentive to the distinctive insights of Christian theology, elaborates an innovative explanation of God-talk, better able to credibly address confusion and controversies that trouble the church, academic theology, and broader culture.
Studies of conceptual and neural mapping in cognitive linguistics, while posing a fundamental challenge for religious belief, also suggest new ways of understanding how people conceptualize God and make theological inferences. This book, inspired by that research and attentive to the distinctive insights of Christian theology, elaborates an innovative explanation of God-talk, better able to credibly address confusion and controversies that trouble the church, academic theology, and broader culture. The first part analyzes both cognitive linguistics’ challenge to standard theological depictions of metaphorical, analogous, symbolic, and literal language, and the discipline’s promise for providing a more satisfactory account. The second half examines six case studies to illustrate how clarifying the conceptual mapping in God-talk and theological inferences provides a powerful tool for advancing religious understanding. The illustrations include the hypothesis that religion is an epiphenomenon of evolution, the so-called “new atheism,” Black theology, and controversies between theologians and Church authorities. This book has won the 2014 CTS Book Award.
- By (author) R Masson
Other Titles in this Series
Divinising Experience
Essays in the History of Religious Experience from Origen to Ricoeur
Volume 23
Christian Theology and the Transformation of Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality
Essays in Honour of David Brown
Volume 64
‘The Little Commonwealth of Man’: The Trinitarian Origins of the Ethical and Political Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth
Volume 42
Finitude and Theological Anthropology
An Interdisciplinary Exploration into Theological Dimensions of Finitude
Volume 47
The Mind of God and the Works of Nature
Laws and Powers in Naturalism, Platonism, and Classical Theism
Volume 65
Mobile Performances
Linguistic Undecidability as Possibility and Problem in the Theology of Religions
Volume 48
The Art of Theology
Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics and the Foundations of Faith
Volume 25
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