Revelation and Faith

Abstract

We have been looking at religious symbols as ways in which people have expressed what they have believed to be their relation to a reality beyond themselves which concerned them in some ultimate and intimate manner. We have seen that a non-literal character is essential to these symbolic forms; idolatry might, in fact, be described as identifying this absolute reality with an image drawn from intra-mundane relationships. It is questionable whether even the heathen, on whom the prophets of the high religions pour out their scorn, do in fact make this literal identification. Rather, their idols are looked on as images in which a supernatural power has taken on itself a local habitation and a name. As Professor Hocking says,¹ “ Early gods are like man and near him. But still, they were as unlike and as remote as he could imagine them. The differences between spirits and men, the gulf fixed between the natural and supernatural — gulf leaped in death — the exaggerations and superlatives, these are as important parts of the conception as are the likenesses and simplicities of intercourse. When man can think beyond the sun, and beyond the sky, — there God goes, and probably first goes.”