On Hyperbolic Language: Speaking With Many Voices

"For the early Christians, the religious experience of encountering Jesus was so different to everyday experience that they used what Leonard Swidler, a professor of interreligious dialogue, has called 'hyperbolic language'. This type of language is metaphorical and poetic, and is used to express extraordinary feelings and emotions that transcend everyday language....A clear endorsement of 'hyperbolic language' has come from the Universal House of Justice. In answering a question about the meaning of one of its statements, it has written that the manifestations of God speak in a language replete with 'poetry, analogy, hyperbole and paradox': 'we must accept that they are realities that cannot be defined in a rigourous manner, as one would attempt to define the terms of mathematics or even of philosophy. This is a realm of knowledge in which poetry, analogy, hyperbole and paradox are to be expected; a realm in which the Manifestations themselves speak with many voices' (From a letter on behalf of the Universal House of Justice, dated 15 October 1992).

Seena Fazel, "Understanding Exclusivist Bahá'i Texts"