Tuesday 24 June 2008

God: literal and metaphorical

Time is short, so I've not been posting much lately. I do intend to start a thread on the regula fidei and the concept of truth in the early church. Till then, a beautiful quote from the seventeenth-century Anglican priest John Donne:

My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literall God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord I intend it to thy glory ....) thou art a figurative, a metaphoricall God too: A God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions ... such Curtaines of Allegories ... O, what words but thine, can express the inexpressible texture, and composition of thy Word.
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XIX Expostulation

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