If a Lion Could Speak

“For My devisings are not your devisings, and your ways are not My ways,” says the Lord.  For as the heavens are high over the earth, so My ways are high over your ways and My devisings over your devisings.”  Isaiah 55:8-9  Robert Alter

Devisings – You’re probably more familiar with this verse translated in the popular religious vernacular:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
⁹ “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Alter’s version is almost the same.  But there’s a difference between “thoughts” and “devisings,” and the difference is crucial.  That’s why we begin this little investigation with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous statement, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”

What did Wittgenstein mean?

Wittgenstein’s theory is that even if a lion could somehow speak our language, or a ‘Lionese to Human’ Google translate app was developed, the lion would still struggle to clearly articulate his point of view to a human being or tell us a compelling story. But why would this be?

Wittgenstein explains this potential breakdown in communication is because lions do not have ‘any conceivable share in our world’. In other words, the lion’s utterances would be meaningless to us, because they would not be based on a shared sense of context. The way a lion thinks about – and views – the world is so different to humans, or indeed other animals, that they would be coming from a completely different frame of reference or context to the human they wanted to chat with at the watering hole (or pub!).[1]

Wittgenstein attempted to demonstrate that human existence is the fundamental requirement of human language.  If other beings could somehow express themselves in human language but did not share in human existence, we would find their communication completely incomprehensible.  This insight is crucially important when it comes to theological proclamations about the divine.

The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides, asserted in the Guide for the Perplexed that human language is completely inadequate to describe God and that even human efforts to describe God’s positive attributes impinge upon God’s absolute unity. Maimonides was merely echoing Aristotle’s view of the divine, a view which contributed significantly to the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  Between Maimonides and Aquinas, God was exiled from human speech.  In other words, God, in His essence, was completely unknowable to human beings.  Why?  Because, according to these very important men, God was outside of all human experience.

Perhaps now you realize why Heschel’s remark that the Bible contains no information about the essential nature of God, but only information about God’s interaction with men is so radical, and so critical.  As Heschel writes: “Only one attribute is reserved for God: He alone is called in the Bible rahum the Merciful One.”^[2]  All those other usual attributes, “eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, immutable, etc.” are not biblical ideas.

Everything we know about God is derived from God’s interaction with men, that is, from God sharing human experience.  The transcendent God of Maimonides and Aquinas is not our God!  He is the God of the philosophers, a God who has nothing to say because “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”  The transcendent God is the divine lion, outside of time and space, without any real connection to us, to our history, to our existence.  Of course, we don’t worship such a God—not really, even if we hold on to the Greek philosopher’s theology.  Why would we?  There is no place for us in divine transcendence.

The theologians knew this.  That’s why they tried so desperately to connect the divine and the human, the transcendent and the immanent.  Quite frankly, they failed.  You see, ultimately the two concepts of God are incompatible, even contradictory.  And the Bible doesn’t embrace both.  It doesn’t say, “My thoughts” are thoughts you cannot know.  That’s why Alter uses “devisings,” from the Hebrew maḥăšābâ.

The basic idea of the word is the employment of the mind in thinking activity. Reference is not so much to “understanding” (cf. bîn), but to the creating of new ideas. . . Six clear variations of the basic thought of this root can be distinguished in the ot. The most frequently used is that of “planning,” “devising.” This variation is employed in reference to both man and God, and it appears in both Qal and Piel. Israelites, for instance, are warned not to “devise” evil against a brother (Zech 7:10). In one verse, Gen 50:20, there is reference to both man and God, as Joseph uses the word twice; first in saying that his brothers “meant” (planned) evil in their earlier treatment of him, but that God “meant” (planned) it for good.^[3]

We can’t know God’s plans!  We don’t have insight into the workings of the divine.  If God doesn’t communicate what He is doing, all we have is speculation (particularly evident in all the “end times” nonsense).  But that isn’t the same as a transcendent implication.  We can think like God thinks.  We can act like God acts.  We can create like God creates.  All within the human realm, of course.  Because we are in His image.  Aquinas’ view of God’s attributes entails that we are nothing like God in any way, and the result is that God is nothing like us.  What Greek philosophy did to the biblical God is make Him into an idol.

Topical Index: thoughts, devisings, maḥăšābâ, philosophy, Wittgenstein, lion, Isaiah 55:8-9

[1] https://ideasandaction.com/if-a-lion-could-speak/

[2] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 148.

^[3] Wood, L. J. (1999). 767 חָשַׁב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 330). Chicago: Moody Press.