The Problem of God in Modern Thought by Philip Clayton

From the Publisher

This study by Philip Clayton reconstructs and evaluates the steps by which the concept of God became a problem in modern thought. Clayton shows that this development has its roots in Descartes's break with the medieval tradition, in Leibniz's failure to build a modern metaphysics of perfection, in Kant's reduction of God to a regulative concept, and in the increasing power of the Spinoza tradition as it met the challenge of German idealism and became incorporated into it. These developments provide the backdrop against which theology's prospects today can be assessed." "Clayton shows how key thinkers of the modern period continued to wrestle with the concept of God as "infinite" and "perfect" and to make fresh proposals for understanding the divine. The sophisticated models of God developed by Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling, among others, are presented, analyzed, and constructively applied to contemporary philosophical theology. Clayton's work reveals the resources that modern thought continues to offer to philosophical theologians. Ultimately, he finds in the narrative of modern thought about God strong support for panentheism, the new theological movement that maintains the transcendence of God while denying the separation of God and the world.

Wolfhart Pannenberg

The Problem of God in Modern Thought offers a new approach to the history of metaphysics in modern philosophy based on the most recent research into the thought of the leading figures from Descartes to Schelling. It takes its cue from the recent French interpretation of Descartes as the founder of a new approach to philosophical theology. This book is the most comprehensive account of the modern history of philosophical theology that presently exists.

Joseph A. Bracken

Having set forth the case for panentheism as the most appropriate model for the God-world relationship in God and Contemporary Science, Clayton here investigates panentheism's historical antecedents in modern philosophy from Descartes to Schelling. Especially valuable is his critique of the classical notion of divine infinity; he asks whether God cannot be both infinite and finite at the same time. Using the resources of Spinoza, Lessing, and the German Idealists, especially Schelling, Clayton points the way to a contemporary solution to some of the enduring problems in modern philosophical theology. In particular, he underscores the need for a radical rethinking of the classical God-world relationship if one is to truly endorse the notion of panentheism.

Louis Dupré

"This study, already laureled in its German version, accomplishes a veritable breakthrough in philosophical theology. Philip Clayton rescues the discipline from a stagnant epistemology and returns it to its native metaphysical ground. His imaginative reinterpretation of major modern thinkers, his careful analysis of seldom examined theological notions, and his comprehensive philosophical erudition give this work the stature of a classic."

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Not to put too fine a point on it: the context for treating the question of God today must be skepticism. Propositional language about God can no longer pass as unproblematic. The history of reflection in this area is littered with skeletons—or better: it is immensely difficult to discern which are the skeletons and which the living, progressing models. Past thinkers may appear overly bound by the philosophical fashions of their day and by the world as they con-structed it; yet we have no reason to believe ourselves more free of such forces than they. Even theologians today have grown squeamish of the "God's-eye point of view," and many reasons have been advanced for worrying that the very idea of such a point of view is confused.

The concept of God refers to a reality that is in some essential sense transcendent of, and thus not locatable within, experience. In our day, I shall argue, this concept presents itself more as a problem than as a solution. God is not at home in any of today's disciplines outside theology—and even there the professionals voice misgivings. Whatever its accessibility in the context of religious faith (and there are also reasons to wonder about this accessibility, especially among an academic public), the concept of God has inherited a variety of unresolved intellectual difficulties. Arguably, the status of God-language has never fully recovered since the collapse of the Scholastic doctrine of analogy. It is a concept that is construed in mutually exclusive fashions. As long as we do not know whether God-talk has a solid basis in human experience—and, if so, where in human experience—the relationship between theism and the various sciences, both in content and in method, remains problematic.

Since the theme of this book is the concept of God, the problems associated with this concept will thus serve as its backdrop. At the outset, atheism must be taken as a full and live possibility. Perhaps naturalism is right; we may be the doomed inhabitants of a dying universe. As Nietzsche wrote,

Once upon a time, in a distant corner of this universe with its countless flickering solar systems, there was a planet, and on this planet some intelligent animals discovered knowledge. It was the most noble and most mendacious minute in the history of the universe—but only a minute. After Nature had breathed a few times their star burned out, and the intelligent animals had to die.

Such a naturalistic scenario, whether its tone is negative (as in the Nietzsche quotation) or more optimistic, must be treated as a live option by any contemporary theory of God. It is thus methodologically unacceptable to immediately assume the impossibility of atheism. For instance, Rahner assures us, humans "cannot—logically and existentially cannot—believe that the hopefulness, the scent of something more, that they experience is only a bold but insane delusion, or that, finally, everything has its basis in an empty nothingness." But of course we can believe this. It is fully possible that there is no general meaning to be had, only the meanings that we create. Indeed, don't religious skeptics from Hume to Kai Nielsen offer ample evidence that it is possible to orient oneself toward the atheist conclusion? It is therefore overquick to assume that "in our explicitly religious turning toward God in prayer, and in metaphysical reflection, we merely bring to our conscious attention what we had always implicitly known about ourselves at the very base of our personal existence."

A crucial way in which the philosophical tradition has expressed this general skepticism concerns the question whether language about God can be "constitutive," that is, can refer to an object and express actual positive content about it. The distinction between constitutive and nonconstitutive goes back to Kant, for whom concepts without empirical content—and thus especially the concept of God—could only be "empty" as knowledge claims (A 51; B 75). But one need not be a Kantian to approach theistic language with a certain degree of doubt; the lines of argument leading toward skepticism about the rationality of God-talk are legion. As examples I trace only two here: the difficulties with "metaphysical explanations" in general, and the problems stemming from the historicity of knowledge.

Evidence and Rational Explanations

If language about God is to be constitutive, it must evidence some explanatory value vis-à-vis human experience. But, to put the issue in general terms, it is not clear how explanations that refer to God could be rational explanations. Many specific versions of this criticism have been formulated: theistic explanations are literally meaningless (A. J. Ayer); they are untestable and thus vacuous (Anthony Flew); they are unfalsifiable and therefore must be sharply bordered off from scientific language (Karl Popper); the series of causes in a theistic explanation can-not be reconstructed and hence natural explanations should be preferred over supernatural explanations (the presumption in favor of naturalism).

The difficulties with such efforts at sharply demarcating science from metaphysics have been widely discussed and need not be rehearsed here. It seems, at least, that it is no longer possible to rule out reflection on first principles using dichotomies such as scientific vs. mythical, falsifiable vs. falsification-immune, or meaningful vs. meaningless. Science is just not as neat as we once thought. Still, one does need to focus on the differences that still remain, especially where they help reveal the epistemological challenges—the challenges about its status as knowledge—that theology faces. One way to grasp these remaining difficulties is in terms of a distinction that Bernard Williams draws: scientists are required to provide a theory of error—a newer theory must be able to say why and where its predecessor went wrong—whereas philosophers working in ethics or metaphysics cannot and need not do so. So the question becomes, Can metaphysics provide a theory of error? Does it possess procedures for testing its claims—or at least for separating out those areas that are rationally undecidable? Can one specify procedures for the critical treatment of theological truth claims?

The following chapters claim to make some progress in addressing these questions. Nonetheless, it does seem unlikely that the explanatory claims of theology could ever achieve the same rational status as the knowledge claims advanced within more concrete and precise disciplines. And it will be hard to claim truth for selected theological theories if the community of scholars is unable to say of any theory in the field that it is false. Ironically, the oft-heralded eternality of metaphysical debates is at the same time their chief weakness. For example, it is often viewed as a strength if a contemporary thinker can trace her or his position back to Parmenides or Heraclitus, Plotinus or Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately, though, such practices give the impression that in this field absolutely nothing has been resolved since the beginning of its history. If we are to rescue the possibility of progress on the question of God, we have to provide a clear notion of what constitutes progress and which criteria signal its presence.

I open this book with a chapter on method, written against the backdrop of pluralism and skepticism, out of deference to the difficulty of these worries. For those of us who do not want to abandon all explanations containing the term God, the task is clear: we must specify a way of treating theological questions that justifies their claim to be rational explanations—for instance, by showing how such explanations are necessary for specific dimensions of human experience. This means showing how metaphysical claims are to be evaluated critically. Should we fail at this effort, then we have to acknowledge that decision procedures are absent in metaphysics. This would presumably leave an irreducible pluralism of gods—or no god(s) at all.

Historicity

A second major challenge to the present project involves historical skepticism—limitations allegedly placed on one's knowledge (or on one's knowing that one knows) because of one's particular position within the history of thought.

The Hermeneutical Shift

The pervasiveness of interpretive issues in the study of history may not ultimately be a block to knowledge, for history could of course lead to a final unity of perspectives. Nonetheless, the plurality of perspectives or "conceptual schemes" does present problems for interpreting past metaphysical positions; it also raises questions about the possible time-boundness of our own reflection about the nature of God. Advocates of the hermeneutical shift have argued convincingly that there are disparities between our "horizon" and the horizons of those whose texts we study; criticism and appropriation always require that one achieve a fusion of disparate horizons.

Now admittedly, exorbitant claims are sometimes made about how hermeneutics, the "science of interpretation," will change everything. One reads occasionally, for example, that one can no longer draw a distinction between theory and observation, between fact and value, between knowledge and interpretation, between interpreting and appropriating a text—even between reading and writing a text! I have argued elsewhere that hermeneutics does not force one into complete skepticism of this sort. Nonetheless, the discussion of hermeneutics does suggest certain limits on any reconstruction of the theories of past thinkers. On the one hand, one must be constantly on the watch for the "otherness" of the historical texts and authors one interprets. Although it may sometimes be possible to criticize or appropriate an author's position and arguments directly, at other times a radically different set of assumptions may separate that world from ours. Only by carefully reconstructing the author's own intellectual and social context can we understand the meaning of her or his concepts, that is, what the author meant by them. As a by-product, such reconstructions often bring home the huge distance between the present and, say, the thought world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a distance that one does not automatically perceive merely by reading the texts of that time.

On the other hand, contemporary theologians need to be equally aware of the links between their metaphysical assertions and their own historical or cultural context. We are initially much less likely, for example, to give credence to theories of timeless being, or to definitive theories of the Absolute—in fact, to definitive theories of anything! Footprints of our zeitgeist rest on titles such as Reason, Truth, and History or On the Plurality of Worlds or The History of God or God: A Biography. Are these prejudices justified? To the extent that we recognize the objects of our study to be time-bound, we must suspect our own conclusions to be so as well.

Philosophy in History

An important collection of essays on the historiography of philosophy, entitled Philosophy in History, edited by Richard Rorty and others, illustrates the insights and pitfalls of the hermeneutical shift. The common thesis of the book's sixteen authors is that we must expect to read historical lines on the faces and in the books of even the "greats" in philosophy. The demise of the time-transcendent view of philosophy affects the way one should approach these "greats," the way to treat their texts, and the claims one makes on behalf of one's own. Call it perspectivalism: our values and goals inhabit present-day beliefs and interpretations just as much as did the values of a Descartes or Leibniz. The movement fromthe rational—which now means: rational by our best lights, at this particular time—to the timelessly true becomes progressively more difficult to justify. For a pointed formulation one looks, as usual, to Richard Rorty:

It is natural for [the philosopher] to write Geistesgeschichte by stringing a lot of [his] notes together, thus skipping between the same old peaks, passing over in silence the philosophical flatlands of, e.g., the third and fifteenth centuries. This sort of thing leads to such extreme cases as Heidegger's attempt to write "the history of Being" by commenting upon texts mentioned in Ph.D. examinations in philosophy in German universities early in this century. In the aftermath of being enthralled by the drama Heidegger stages, one may begin to find it suspicious that Being stuck so closely to the syllabus.

In short: "What we need is to see the history of philosophy as the story of the people who made splendid but largely unsuccessful attempts to ask the questions which we ought to be asking" (ibid., pp. 73-74).

Rorty notwithstanding, how far does the historicity of knowledge really drive us? Discontinuities of interest and compellingness need not lead to incommensurability. Is it really impossible to know what Spinoza was saying unless one shares his same interests? Nevertheless, awareness of discontinuities does force a more careful look at context. It must affect our expectations as well, as Schneewind argues:

Since the reason for exhuming the great philosophers of the past is to help us arrive at better answers to our own questions, we must be prepared as much as necessary to recast their thought in our own idiom, seeking to produce a rational reconstruction of their beliefs rather than a picture of full historical authenticity where these two projects begin to collide. (p. 200)

We can grant this last point, fortunately, without having to follow Rorty all the way: There is more in common in the philosophical conversation through history than Rorty grants (p. 51), which means that rational reconstructions can tell us more about the authors' interests and our own than Rorty thinks (p. 54). Still, he has correctly seen the connection of meaning and truth: "Just as determining meaning is a matter of placing an assertion in a context of actual and possible behavior, so determining truth is a matter of placing it in the context of assertions which we ourselves should be willing to make"; more briefly: "Truth and meaning are not to be ascertained independently of one another" (p. 55). It need not follow that philosophy is to be disbanded in favor of "Geistesgeschichte as canon-formation." Still, such cautions do help to control widely speculative rational reconstructions of past philosophers through a clearer sense of their otherness, and to supplement plodding historical reconstructions with more probing questions into past authors' assumptions and perspectives.

Perhaps Rorty's Philosophy in History boils down to the lukewarm exhortation, "Do not ignore the context, but do not be ruled by it either." Still, the book serves as a good up-front reminder of how various historical contexts affect the thinkers discussed below—and on the way one must evaluate them. Our reflection on theism may well be influenced by personal, social, cultural, and historical factors without, I suggest, having to be reduced to them.

First Implications for Metaphysics

General skeptical worries associated with the hermeneutical shift, and specific difficulties involved in knowing the sort of being that God would be, have transformed the manner in which one must approach theism today. We have already seen how the changes affect the study of the history of modern thought, how they demand a movement toward hermeneutically sensitive methods of study. Typically, they result in the call to recognize the ineliminable role of context in all intellectual inquiry.

Yet one discipline still claims to rise above the fray: theology's philosophical sibling, metaphysics. Throughout its history, metaphysics has been concerned with timeless truths. Perhaps the challenge of contextualization would be relatively unproblematic for historians, or even political theorists, for whom timeless truths are not the issue. But how can metaphysical reflection do justice to this changed epistemological climate and still remain metaphysics? Can there be a metaphysical reflection on God whose claims remain preliminary and hypothetical, whose method builds in a sensitivity to context? Is "pluralistic metaphysics" a viable shift within this discipline or a contradictio in adjecto? I will argue that metaphysical reflection must ultimately remain by its nature dissatisfied with multiple outcomes; the driving force in this discipline is always to unify, to select the best theory from among competing alternatives. Still, there are cases where a clear rational decision cannot yet be made between the competitors. In such cases, claims for the finality and certainty of one's own position can only appear as absurd and unwarranted.

Our own epistemic position is characterized by the lack of ultimacy—no less when it is the Ultimate that is under discussion! This fact calls for a certain continuing attitude of humility toward one's own constructive theological proposals. But it also suggests handling the great texts of the past in a different manner. No longer can they appear as necessary, canonical moments in a perfectly unfolding story. This gives us a new task: not just to interpret authors' intentions but also rationally to reconstruct their work in light of the narrative as we now see it. As a positive example of interpretation qua rational reconstruction, take Jonathan Bennett's widely discussed book on Spinoza. Compared to earlier treatments such as Wolfson's, Bennett's method is unabashedly reconstructive: coming to the text from contemporary developments in physics, psychology, and philosophy, he freely rejects or reinterprets large segments of Spinoza's Ethics. The line of argument at which he finally arrives is inspired, in some sense, by Spinoza, but it is certainly not Spinoza's own. Merely to restate Spinoza's position as he himself understood it, Bennett recognizes, is both uninteresting and unhelpful.

At the same time, Bennett does not fall into the postmodern treatment of historical authors that Rorty advocates. His analysis is clear, careful, and solidly philosophical—little sign here of a move from philosophy toward "Geistesgeschichte as canon-formation." Bennett assumes that there is clear progress in the history of thought, that the conceptual tools available today are markedly sharper than those of the past and better able to overcome the limitations affecting Spinoza's own presentation. However important the acknowledgment of contextual considerations, I suggest, there is no reason to give up the rigor of careful reconstructions such as Bennett's, or to forego the use of recently developed analytic tools such as set theory or modal logic. Hermeneutically aware treatments need not be as vague and rambling as Rorty's (post-Kehre) publications; they do not condemn us all to writing in the manner of French deconstructionists. It is possible to return to early modern metaphysics with the clarity of, for example, recent analytic work in philosophical theology. Such, anyway, is my goal in what follows.

But given the skeptical worries already canvassed, how can one find a way still to claim that the goal of theistic metaphysics is true statements about the divine nature? Is there any reason to think that this activity achieves its goal, even in part?

Nonconstitutive Approaches to Metaphysics

Since Kant a number of thinkers have responded to skeptical considerations such as the ones adduced above by denying that statements about God serve an explanatory or epistemic role at all; language, they say, is being used in other than a constitutive sense in this realm. Some of these critics interpret God-language in a noncognitive sense, so that it has cognitive force only when eliminated or translated (one can call these eliminative views), whereas others would continue to theorize in something like the traditional mode while interpreting its status differently (revisionist views).

Eliminative Views of Metaphysics

Most eliminative views are explicitly reductionistic. This is certainly true of the reduction of talk of God to socioeconomic forces, to psychosexual developmental phases, or to the resentiment of a powerless priestly caste. But the tendency toward metaphysical reductionism has a much broader intellectual clientele than the vigorous skepticism of a Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche. In our day it is perhaps most clearly the attitude (presupposition? working hypothesis?) of much natural and social science. Scientific reductionists are modern-day Comteans: the only way to clear the terrain for science, they seem to assume, is to attack metaphysics as a nonempirical form of reflection that stands outside, indeed opposed to, the scientific sphere of empirical research and theorizing. The assumptions underlying this thesis are more often unreflectively empiricist and naturalist than they are militantly positivistic or scientistic.

A large number of philosophical treatments of the God problem today are implicitly reductionistic—whatever the stated goal or premises of the work. One thinks, for example, of various noncognitivist construals of theistic metaphysics that presuppose emotivism, the view that theistic language merely expresses the emotional attitude and priorities of the asserter. Those who hold this position need not argue that theistic language should therefore be abandoned or replaced by psychological descriptions. But clearly, when the cognitive and argumentative core that has characterized traditional metaphysics has been eliminated—such anyway is the impression they create—little reason is left not to reject theistic language as well. (At best it is a matter of taste.)

These comments on metaphysics and rationality suggest a criterion for what counts as "the elimination of metaphysics." If a given interpretation of discourse about God does not allow for argumentation, for the formulation and criticism of positions in conceptual terms, then the result can only appear to be a set of assertions about, say, divine intentions or attributes. Whether the interpreter actually goes on to urge us to abandon all God-language is irrelevant; its status as rational discourse has already been implicitly rejected. Not to replace theological theories with a new operative discipline such as psychology or anthropology appears then merely as a failure of nerve (or as aesthetic preference).

I have elsewhere urged the untenability of a priori or methodological reductionism, using as grounds the demise of positivism and the implications of the hermeneutical shift.23 Nonetheless, we cannot close out the possibility of a final reduction-in-fact, namely the failure in practice of theistic metaphysics to maintain itself as a form of critical inquiry. If contemporary talk about God fails to satisfy the standards for a cognitive interpretation, then the consequences should be drawn: better to treat such language as poetry or as a source for rational hypotheses than to keep up the pretense of progressive debate. Our openness to this possible final outcome will have a crucial impact on determining the status of theistic conclusions in what follows.

Revisionist Views of Metaphysics

A number of views eschew reductionism yet find reason to deny metaphysical language about God a fully constitutive status. An uncontroversial example might be the Scholastic doctrine of analogy or various "apophatic" theories of theistic language. Here language about God is not literally or univocally true of its object, yet neither is it equivocal. Advocates have worked hard to spell out a precise mediating position (however unsuccessful they may have been in their attempts). Various contemporary views fall into this "cognitive but not literal" category, even though few try to state the exact manner in which their language does and does not correspond to its referent.

Theistic Language as Limit Language: Ricoeur, Tracy

Paul Ricoeur is well known for his assertion that language about God is a particularly effective way of expressing aspects of the human experience of the world. In a well-known work, David Tracy has taken Ricoeur's suggestions and developed them into a full-fledged theological position. Other theologians who might be considered in this regard include John Macquarrie and Karl Rahner. The strength of theories like Ricoeur's is that they give meaning to theistic language within the context of human experience, without having to claim that such language is fully literal or constitutive.

Unfortunately, the disadvantages are equally clear: For Ricoeur or Tracy, whatever transcendent intentionality the term God has, it must finally express a disposition of the human subject rather than of an active divine agent. Further, the Ricoeurian move does not leave place for critical discourse about such language. If, for instance, I find post-Holocaust literature to be more illuminating of human experience than Jesus' parables, there can be no remaining ground for dialogue between us. Ricoeur and Tracy are apparently willing to accept this consequence. But it removes what has been for theistic metaphysics its distinguishing feature: the competition between alternative conceptions to see which can provide the best arguments in its defense.

Metaphor

A number of recent works stress the role of metaphor in science and the importance of avoiding a literal construal of theological metaphors. In general, these views hold that language about God is a tertium quid, being neither literally true of its object nor known to be false. They focus instead on the "disclosive" power of the language, its ability to create new experience or new insight based on the juxtaposition of concepts not normally associated in our language.

There is much to be said for the openness to new ways of speaking about God fostered by metaphor-based theories. Still, the danger with the metaphor concept is that it can turn this openness into an insurmountable barrier, ruling out any subsequent theoretical confrontation between competing metaphors. So we read that metaphor is a call to openness, to the novel, to the revelation of God. Indeed, Berggren warns in one article that any attempt to specify what it is that metaphorical language about God is asserting—"a reduction of the metaphor's cognitive import to non-tensional statements"—threatens the "vitality" of the metaphor and precipitates a fall into myth or "a believed absurdity."

The irony of positions such as Berggren's or Soskice's is that they base their use of metaphor in part on the role of metaphors in science, and then argue that, because metaphors are crucial in theistic language, such language should be treated more like literature. But the difference in the use of literary and scientific metaphors is crucial. It is true that literary metaphors are not meant to be the basis for argumentation; they foster aesthetic appreciation and emotional involvement with the subject matter. By contrast, in science metaphors give rise to testable theories. Though the metaphor itself may not be testable, if it is to be retained it must form the core of a successful research program, as Lakatos has convincingly argued.

In short: the parallels with scientific metaphors do not justify an end or limit to rational discussion of theological themes. Instead, they provide the opposite impetus: to find contexts in which the merit of various metaphors can be compared and contrasted. Such, anyway, is my task in these pages. Of course, the process may not prove the ultimate superiority of only one metaphor, any more than the physicist is compelled to choose between the wave and particle models of light. Still, as the wave/particle example shows, the resultant pluralism of metaphors is acceptable only to the extent that each has demonstrated its explanatory power in some specific context. God-language can of course be transformed into poetry, as can physics; but the inevitable presence of metaphors within theological discussions is not sufficient grounds for transforming them in this way.

Models of God: McFague

A recent school of thought reinterprets theistic language as presenting models for God. Of course, one finds a stress on multiple perspectives in earlier twentieth- century metaphysicians. A. N. Whitehead, for one, viewed pluralism within metaphysics as healthy: "When we survey the history of thought ...we find that one idea after another is tried out, its limitations defined, and its core of truth elicited." But in the more recent work of Sallie McFague and Janet Soskice, all metaphysical or theological language becomes metaphorical. No single theoretical framework is adequate for the concept of God: "A metaphorical theology will insist that many metaphors and models are necessary, that a piling up of images is essential, both to avoid idolatry and to attempt to express the richness and variety of the divine-human relationship."

The strength of McFague's position lies in her insight that theistic language cannot remain purely metaphorical, that there is a drive, within religion as well as metaphysics, to bring metaphorical language to conceptual expression (ibid., pp. 22-23). In the reciprocal movement between these two poles, she argues, models arise. A model is "a dominant metaphor, a metaphor with staying power"; it gives us "a grid, screen, or filter which helps us to organize our thoughts about a less familiar subject" by seeing it in terms of a more familiar one (p. 23).

Stressing theological theories as models thus represents a mediating position between full metaphoricity and the univocity of a single established theory. In science, as Achinstein has argued, models express the assumptions about an object or system, and are "treated as approximation[s] useful for certain purposes." This in-between status—not quite theory, not quite fiction—allows for pluralism in science: since models are used for different purposes, there may be alternative models in use at the same time. Still, theoretical models do claim to be approximations to the actual structure of the system in question (p. 118), and they can serve all the same functions as theories: They can be used "for purposes of explanation, prediction, calculation, systematisation, derivation of laws and so forth" (p. 106).

These considerations help to justify the rubric "models of God" as the starting point for the constructive systematic work in the following chapters. Models begin as a heuristic aid for thought in a complicated area; they simplify, organize, and guide our reflection. If successful, a given model (of the atom, of God) may become firmly embedded in our conception of the subject. And in their claim to approximate the truth, they give rise to theory, namely the attempt to say precisely where the model is correct and where its limitations lie. The model of God as an infinite or a perfect being may be accessible to theoretical examination in a way that the concept God alone is not.

The models that McFague proposes in Metaphorical Theology serve the goal of bringing God closer: God as friend, mother, lover. In a more recent book, she urges the acceptance of models that further feminist, antinuclear, and ecological concerns. Likewise, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has worked to un-cover nonbiblical models for divinity in the Hellenistic milieu with which women can more easily associate. Of course, if models for God are chosen exclusively for their helpfulness in forwarding a particular social or political agenda, theologians open themselves to Feuerbach's criticism that their language is really about human relationships rather than about a divine agent; and McFague's presentation is certainly open to this criticism. To avoid this danger, one must also—indeed, in the first place—look for models that successfully formulate a full, coherent notion of the God whose existence is being asserted. A particular advantage of the early modern period is the conceptual strength of the various models developed. By the time one has traced the strengths and corrected the weaknesses of the major positions through the time of Schelling, one has a clear sense of what an adequate model of God should include. Then (and I would like to say: only then) is one in the position to evaluate the adequacy of the contemporary models presented.

As we saw, the crucial role of models in science has long been acknowledged, and the explicit appeal to models in theology is not new. In his quest for an originary principle (arche or archai), Plato employed multiple concepts in different contexts, including myths (Timaeus) and similes (Republic books 6 and 7). If anything, the impetus to focus more on models within science has come from traditional metaphysics, from its awareness of the (at best) analogi-cal status of its language, rather than the reverse. Nonetheless, the recent em-phasis on "models of God," inspired in part by developments in the philosophy of science, offers a particularly helpful framework for mediating two otherwise untenable sides of contemporary theological debate. There are good reasons to be hesitant about ascribing literal status to language about God; yet a theology of pure equivocation or indeterminate metaphorical reference might just as well be replaced by literature (with its greater evocative powers) or reduced to cultural anthropology. The idea of models well connotes the ideal, if not the reality, of full conceptual expression. It allows for a gradual movement from predominately nonconceptual language (mystical experience or poetic images of the divine) toward—if never in fact to—a completed metaphysical system.