How to Speak of God in Human Language: Comments on John Macquarrie's God-talk: an Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology

It is a key problem for theology in the 20th century that how one can speak of God in human language, since the drama of it is played out against the backdrop of the linguistic turn, in which the linguistic oriented empiricists who dominate the English speaking world want to identify every word's designatum in the same way as any mathematician or empirical scientist do in their own field. To deal with this key problem are there three ways: proceeding from human being's language (Rudolf Bultmann), proceeding from the Word of God (Karl Bath) and proceeding from the relation between God and human being (Paul Tillich). Following Tillich, mainly in the light of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Existence and partly appealing to the linguistic theory of post-positivism, John Macquarrie hopes to show: (1) that Existence opens to human being. (2) that it is this Existence that theology is talking about and (3) that this Existence is the divine substance. On ground that Heidegger's doctrine has not been widely accepted and Macquarrie's elaboration of (2) and (3) are neither clear nor rigorous enough, it can be concluded that Macquarrie's solution to God-talk fails.