Analogy, not metaphor - laying the smack-down on nominalism.

The USCCB declares that Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God distorts Catholic concept of God.


Here's the USCCB opinion.

Several things are interesting about the opinion.  For those of us who think that nominalism was the worst thing since the bubonic plague, the USCCB takes Sister Johnson to task for her assertion that human language can say nothing about God.  Human language can say something about God, that thing will certainly be limited by human conceptions, but it is not nothing. Words like "goodness" and "love" can be thought of by way of analogy from how such words apply to us to how they would apply to an infinite, spiritual, eternal being. 

For Sister Johnson, however, descriptions of God are arbitrary and metaphorical.  They do not describe God, but only, perhaps, our experience of God. Once she makes that leap, then she can describe God any way she wants because no description of God is rooted in God.  Then, she can go the whole nine yards and say that anyone's description of God is as equally valid as anyone else's description.

The USCCB also seems interested in heading off the last two hundred years of liberal Protestantism by noting that Sister Johnson gets into the same trouble that Kant got into by positing a God who was completely beyond human understanding.  Once that proposition is accepted, they note, then there is no objective way for understanding God, and the next step - which Johnson takes - is that talk about God becomes nothing but a subjective discussion of how the notion of God functions in human society.  So, if you want to define God as the "feeling of transcendence," as did the Nineteenth Century founder of liberal Protestantism, Freidrich Schleiermacher, well and good, but if you want to define God in terms of "blood and race," perhaps not so good.

Fred Sanders on First Things' Evangel blog draws an analogy to the Rob Bell kerfuffle:

As an evangelical Protestant, it’s interesting to watch the dynamics of this controversy playing out inside the Roman Catholic theological scene. The similarities and differences between it and the Rob Bell kerfluffle are equally instructive. On the Roman Catholic side, the provocateur is an accomplished theologian, re-stating for the third or fourth time in book form her basic teaching, through an academic publisher without sensational publicity or a reach that aspires far beyond the textbook market. The critics are recognized teaching authorities (bishops) in the theologian’s own church, they didn’t act until four years after publication, and they scarcely seem aware that there is an internet (releasing pdfs of statements on letterhead). The differences from the Bell case are striking. But the similarity is also striking: unstoppable polarization, as if there are two churches struggling with each other inside the institutional unity of the Roman Catholic church, as much as within the movement known as evangelicalism.


Theological conservatives like me think that both Bell and Johnson have crossed some lines and published books that do not state the Christian message accurately. Bell’s critics were shunted aside with the rhetorical question, “Who made you the judge of what’s orthodox?” But in the case of Johnson’s critics, it’s not a rhetorical question: the Roman Catholic magisterium is who made the council of bishops the judge of what’s orthodox. An evangelical onlooker might understandably think that that will make all the difference between the two cases. But it won’t. Two kinds of Roman Catholic theologians disagree about this book, and the gulf between them is as big as the gulf between Rob Bell and Al Mohler.

Maybe not to some, but to the average person in the pew, the simple statement that Sister Johnson's book has been defined as not being Catholic carries weight, and carries more weight, I suspect than a statement that Bell's book is not "orthodox" made by a long list of pastors.