Zoltán Kövecses

Imagining God

Theology

“In his book Humberto Casanova makes use of the conceptual metaphor theory, as first introduced by Lakoff and Johnson. His analysis offers two strong claims about fundamentalism in religion, especially in Christianity. First, the church presents the idea of God through anthropomorphization. Second, the worldview of the church cannot be reconciled with that found in today’s democratic societies. The basic problem with these conceptual metaphors, Casanova contends, is that they cannot be taken literally because they are incongruous with what people know about the world today.”