Sentences with phrase «apophatic theology»
Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is an approach to understanding God or the divine by negating or saying what God is not, rather than making positive assertions about what God is. Instead of trying to describe or define God's qualities, it highlights the limitations of human language and understanding when it comes to comprehending the divine. It suggests that God is beyond human comprehension and can only be approached through silence or mystic experience. Full definition
Unless we are in effect to abandon all attempts to talk about God as such (a form of apophatic theology which Neville's position seems to favor), the «devious analogy» to which he refers is so devious that it is hard to distinguish it from equivocation or even fraudulent misrepresentation.
religion-online.org
I prefer the mystical apophatic theology [knowing by unknowing] to the cataphatic theology of the more popular orthodoxy.
Its artistic abstraction hints at apophatic theology, and the saint's holiness yet also humanity unites joy and sadness.
That's why I prefer apophatic theology.
What is called apophatic theology says that we can only say what God is not — «Neti, Neti», «not this, not that», as the famous Hindu text puts it God, as mystical theology insists, can not be spoken of, but must be experienced.
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the method through which they look at theology is called «apophatic theology», which is contra the Western style of theology in that it speaks silence towards God, who is, they say, in many ways, unspeakable.
Apophatic theology is not without its usefulness, of course.
Jeremy, I think you got it right by pointing to what God could not be if not having been a Trinity in Himself, that is, an ever loving and relational God from time immemorial [reminds me somehow of an apophatic theology as I saw in «The Cloud of Unknowing» or «The Dark Night of the Soul» (Juan de la Cruz)-RSB-.
When we affirm something of God (kataphatic theology), we have subsequently and immediately to deny it (apophatic theology) before we can dare assert it again on a new level.