Ian McFarland, in his book The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation offers a nice little sketch on how univocal, equivocal, and analogical language and thinking works vis-à-vis knowledge and talk of God. Let me share that, and then offer a reification of analogy of being (analogia entis) through referring us to a constructive proposal on an analogy of faith (analogia fidei). McFarland writes:

But Christian Scripture also includes no shortage of positive (or “cataphatic”) claims about God, statements that do not deny but rather affirm definite attributes of God. Indeed, because these attributes are predicated of God, in whom, as the source of all reality, every created good is fully and unsurpassably realized, they are sometimes referred to as divine perfections. And yet it is not immediately clear how the ascription of any such qualities to God can be squared with God’s status as “Not Other.” For if God’s being transcends and exceeds all our categories and concepts, what meaning can be ascribed to the divine perfections? Scripture may not provide the words, but if God is transcendent, then their meaning cannot be such as to subsume God under the same categories that govern their everyday use; the result is that their theological application seems to be hopelessly equivocal. We must say that God is good, for example, but such affirmations can provide no more knowledge of God’s goodness than knowledge of a dog’s bark gives about the bark on a tree.

At one level, Christians will concede the point. That is, based on the witness of Scripture (and thus, so to speak, on God’s authorization), they will want to affirm that certain qualities (e.g., goodness, wisdom, righteousness) are genuinely true of God, while at the same time allowing that God’s transcendence means that they do not know how they are true of God. In short, they will admit that when they say that God is good, wise, or righteous, they do not fully understand what they are saying. But neither will they conclude that those words carry no meaning at all, because Christians maintain that there is a middle ground between predicating qualities of God in the same way that we do of other entities and pure equivocation. This third way is that of analogy. Thomas Aquinas offers the word “healthy” as an example of analogical predication found in everyday speech. He notes that the word “healthy” may be used to describe a person, her diet, and her urine, but that “healthy” is clearly not being used in the same way across these three cases since it is not possible to derive what it means to say that either a diet or urine is healthy from knowledge of what it means for a person to be healthy. At the same time, someone who understands all three uses of “healthy” can articulate the relationship between them (viz., that a healthy diet promotes health in a person, and that healthy urine reflects it) and so explain how these uses, while genuinely distinct, nevertheless stand in a meaningful relationship with one another and so are not simply equivocal. In the same way, terms like “goodness” and “wisdom” apply to God in a way that cannot be understood on the basis of their application in everyday contexts (e.g., it is not simply a matter of a quantitative increase, as though God were wise like Socrates, only more so), but that somehow both encompasses and completes our everyday understanding of their meaning.[1]

We see McFarland briefly refer to Aquinas, who was famous for developing his style of the analogy of being. For Aquinas, and the trad following, this is a method for thinking God, by way of analogical (and speculative) reflection whereby the Christian thinks God, ostensibly, in a sort of combine between absolute univocal and equivocal modes of thought. Aquinas, attempted to think God from effects (in the created order), and negatively infer who and what God is by way of negating finitude in discursion, as that gives way to the way God ‘must’ be as the infinitude of all that is etc.

Evangelical Calvinists, after Barth and Torrance, offer an alternative way to frame analogical reflection. It is a mode whereby the Christian, as they are union with Christ by the Spirit, come to the miraculous sui generis capacity to think God from within the center of His own life in Jesus Christ. This analogical way, as alluded to earlier, is known as the analogy of faith/relation. It is as the Christian becomes participant, by the adoption of grace, with and in the humanity of Jesus Christ, that by way of Christ’s vicarious faith (think knowledge of God in filial relation) there is an ‘analogy of faith’ set up, whereby us ‘adopted children’, by the Holy Spirit, can have a faith that is generated by Christ’s for us, and in this faith there is a correspondence that obtains between Christ’s faith for us and ‘our faith’ as that is generated in and grounded by Christ’s. The point is this: unlike Aquinas, analogy, in the analogy of faith frame, is not something thought of in terms of an abstract being—that is an abstract human being unconnected or ungrounded from Christ’s—but it is only an analogy in the sense that it is a mediating way forged first between the “noumenal” and “phenomenal” in and through the eternal Logos’ transecting the gap between His eternal triune time with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and thisworldly time us creaturely creatures inhabit in a temporal world of woe and wane. It is in this transecting, more concretely, in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ, wherein an analogia fidei is constructed, such that us ‘adopted children’ can have a genuine knowledge and relationship with the living God; such that ‘our concepts’ of God, have come to have a fittingness for knowledge and relation to Him, insofar as those are given context and meaning in and through the Logo’s commandeering of all things for His eternal life and purpose; just as He is creation’s purpose and reality for all time.

[1] Ian A. McFarland, The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 25-6 kindle.