Patricia Hofer

A deeper understanding of Old Testament imagery.

“Grammatically the things we say of Him are ‘metaphorical’: but in a deeper sense it is our physical and psychic energies that are mere ‘metaphors’ of the real Life which is God. Divine Sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat. …For it is just the recognition of God’s positive and concrete reality which the religious imagery preserves. …The crudest Old Testament pictures of Jahweh thundering and lightning out of dense smoke, making mountains skip like rams, …transmits that sense of living Deity which evaporates in abstract thought. …Perhaps we may rightly reject much of the Old Testament imagery. But we must be clear why we are doing so: not because the images are too strong but because they are too weak. The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. …If we must have a mental picture to symbolize Spirit, we should represent it a something heavier than matter.” (CS Lewis, Miracles, 146-147)

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