Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language

by Sallie McFague

". . . a liberating book about a liberating theological approach."
--Christianity and Crisis

" Metaphorical Theology is a brilliant piece of writing which will make an important contribution both to new thinking on he nature of religious language and also to the dialogue between Christianity and Feminist Theology."
--Rosemary Radford Ruether
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

"The great virtue of Professor McFague's book is that it tackles [some] crucial problems in an extremely perceptive and creative way . . . .All in all it is a most timely book both for the theological and for the church at large."
--Maurice Wiles
Regius Professor of Divinity
Christ Church, Oxford University

Genres: Theology, Religion, Spirituality, Christianity, Feminism, Philosophy, Christian

240 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1982

About the author

Sallie McFague (born 1933) was an American feminist Christian theologian.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Sallie McFague's work of feminist theology has been in this world for 36 years, and it badly needs a wider reading. Published in 1982, it remains as fresh as ever – perhaps fresher in this age of #metoo and increasing awareness of the ways sexism and patriarchy have stymied gender equality. Metaphorical Theology is a slim volume, but packs a heavy punch. It seeks to dethrone "God as Father" as the primary "root-metaphor" of Christian belief and replace it with something less patriarchal.

First, McFague lays the groundwork by exploring the importance of metaphors for human learning – based on her copious citations, she's synthesizing many voices but not breaking new ground, which doesn't make it any less mind-blowing for those of us unfamiliar with the research. She argues that metaphors are the foundation of human thought: All learning requires interpreting new data in light of previous experiences, seeing "this" as "that." Groups of metaphors combine to form models, and these models provide the basis for the Bible's relational depictions of God and humanity.

With that basis, she seeks to create what she calls a "metaphorical theology" – one that describes God with the inherent relational and imprecise characteristics of metaphors. Such a theology, she argues, should rely on a metaphor for God that subverts, rather than entrenches, the patriarchal assumptions that have become entrenched in Western society. She settles on, and makes an excellent case for, the metaphor of God as friend.

No doubt this decision will incur (or has incurred) pushback – the notion of Jesus as our friend has certainly received its share in recent years – but McFague supports it well, both with biblical references and practical exploration of its implications.

The primary takeaway for me was McFague's exploration of the nature and purpose of metaphors – their inherently relational nature, their use in Jesus' parables and the possibility of seeing the life and death of Jesus as a metaphor for God. The primary shift in my thinking sparked by this book is that the biblical metaphors for God should not be seen as describing the divine nature but rather the divine-human relationship. Thus describing God as father is not a description of God as somehow inherently male or patriarchal but a metaphor referring to certain aspects of our relationship with God. Such a perspective allows for a greater variety of metaphors while also limiting our tendency to standardize one image and turn it into an idol that stands in for God.

I could go on and on. Obviously, I found this book terrific – I learned a lot, and McFague writes with a clear and compelling style (although I would still caution general readers that this is definitely an academic work).

The only thing keeping this from being a five-star book is that the third chapter, which discusses the use of models in science, is completely skippable – I know because I skipped it after two pages and didn't miss it. Aside from that, however, this is an incredible work of feminist theology, and well worth the read for those seeking a more inclusive way of thinking about God.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I needed to read.

Just some background on me: I've been a Christian pretty much my whole life though I went through the expected doubts in my teens...and twenties...and occasionally today. I went to seminary and read lots of theology and Bible. We learned theology in systematic theology class. We also were exposed to so-called "contextual theology" at some point: feminist theology, liberation theology, etc. As mostly white males, we didn't notice our own context. Others were contextual, we were not. Or so we thought.

I've been trying to break out of this bubble and have benefited from reading James Cone recently. There have been other books and blogs and thinkers on Twitter. This book by Sallie McFague adds to that journey out of the bubble.

Its a great book. McFague develops what a metaphorical theology would be by discussing models and metaphors and the like. She looks at what models in science do and how that is similar and different from theology. Finally, she discusses God as Father, one of the defining metaphors of Christianity. In this she notes that feminist theologians have a variety of views, some want to totally move away from Christianity to a different religion focused on God as Mother, others want to reform Christianity from within while getting away from language of God as Father while others simply see a need to redefine what Father means.

Overall, this is a helpful book. Not just a helpful book to check off a box, as if a white male like me can read a feminist theologian and feel sufficiently progressive. I mean, McFague is a good theologian in her own right, not because she's female but because she's thoughtful and has good stuff to say. I don't want to pigeonhole her. That said, white male Christians like me ought to be reading women like McFague and black men like Cone and so many others. So I recommend this one for anyone who likes reading theology, especially for men who like theology but haven't been exposed to feminist theologians.

[Cody Case · Rating 2 out of 5]

Far beit for me to question a Vanderbilt doctor... Na, I take that back. That's exactly what I'm going to do. I appreciate the impulse and aims of "Metaphorical Theology," but feel that this book falls far short of its intention. At best, I would say that McFague's account is drastically incomplete.
The book's arguement: Metaphor is essentially the way we think, not just on the theological level, but even on the most commonplace. To say "this is a chair," is ultimately a metaphorical statement, which could be expanded into, "I've seen many objects called 'chairs' and the one I'm looking at now shares the same qualities, thus this too is 'like' a chair." She argues that we never perceive things directly, but always in terms of similarity and dissimilarity. Example: we can't simply observe a tree because we have to observe the tree through our metaphorical judgments. Our perception of a tree is "prejudiced." It's not simply "this is a tree," but this is like other trees, and not like other trees.
When she turns to theology, her contention is that the recognition of metaphor as the base of all thinking, the element of this "is and is not like," can eliminate literlaism or simple identification, thus freeing religious language to be imaginative and inclusive. God is not a Father. God is like (and not like) a father.
My critique: She ignores a hole that's too big for me to ignore. -A metaphor is a comparison/relation of two partially known things. However, if that's true, how can we include God in a metaphor? For she also says that we can only know God indirectly through metaphor. It's a closed circle that we cannot get into. Consider the difference: We can say, "God is like a rock," and we will assume that God has the qualities of a rock (i.e. sturdiness, reliability, strength, etc). But how does the inverse work? "A rock is like God." Well what the hell does that mean? We don't know anything about God in God's self. The metaphor only works one way, which makes it not a comparison of attributes, but a transference of attributes. In the end, this approach falls decisively dead beneath the Freudian critique (we create God as we need God to be).
No! Any viable theology needs the element of revelation or epiphany. Some way of claiming that God can be known, at least in part, apart from our own wishful thinking.

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Preface
• Kaufman suggests that the Judeo-Christian tradition may not be merely irrelevant but harmful (not only annihilating ourselves but life as such on our planet). The traditional imagery for God, Kaufman claims, tends to support either militarism or escapism, but not the one thing needful—human responsibility for the fate of the earth
• Task of this book: deconstruction and reconstruction of models by which we understand the relationship between God and world. Culminates with thought experiment of God as friend
• Sobering comment: this book must “show how language has its power to revitalize when faced by the entrenched distortions of economic and social privilege” — Fucko was right: language is controlled by those in power, that revolution would take reversing the insiders and the outsiders.
• But models of God as mother, lover, friend, and healer suggest a different vision of existence. It is one of mutuality, nurture, self-sacrifice, fidelity, and care for the oppressed and vulnerable.
• No one writes a full, complete theology. Each theology is an intensification of a particular, concrete tradition and sensibility.
• 1. Toward a Metaphorical Theology
• Opens with Weil’s problems of religious language: she is sure that her love for God is not an illusion and equally sure that none of her conceptions of God resembles him. Augustine reiterates: the person who says the most about God is dumb–our only alternatives seem to be speaking in halting, inadequate words or to remain silent. Christianity never chooses to remain silent lol
• Religious language is a PROBLEM. It’s not that we’re sure of God but unsure of language about God–it’s that we are unsure both at experiential and expressive levels.
 We cannot return to the ancient sacramental world; here, apart from religious context of some kind, religious language becomes both idolatrous and irrelevant.
• It becomes idolatrous because without a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery, we forget the inevitable distance between our words and the divine reality. It becomes irrelevant because without a sense of the immanence of the divine in our lives, we find language about God empty and meaningless.
 So WORSHIP remains the primary context of religious language: to keep God from collapsing in on our words we need that sense of mystery
 Another critical context for religious language: INTERPRETIVE. Conscious of plurality and precedent.
• Idolatry of Religious Language
 Policed by more conservative movements, who fear un-truth, relativization, a 1:1 representation chain. Where does literalism come from? 1. Loss of prayer 2. Positivistic scientism injects narrow view of truth into our culture but most of all 3. WE DO NOT THINK IN SYMBOLS ANYMORE (that is, we have lost our sacramental form of mentality/sacramental sensibility) Get this girl in a high latin mass
 But literalism WILL NOT DO.
• Irrelevance of Religious Language
 We’re secularized. Images might be sentimental if anything but most of all boring, repetitive. We are essentially indifferent to it.
 FEMINIST critique has three points re: language, its powers and its abuses (summary of Daly tbh)
• 1. Whoever names the world owns the world
• 2. Problem isn’t just the appellation ‘God the father’ but that entire structure of divine-human/human-human relationships is patriarchal
• 3. Religious language is not only religious but human, not only about God but about us.
• Can we revitalize religious language given the loss of sacramentalism?
 She says her answer is not in the Catholic church be that’s “static and focused on the natural, not the historical, order”
 She misses the analogia entis, analogy of being: the entire earthly order is a "figure” of the divine order, if each and every scrap of creation, both natural and human, participates in and signifies the divine order according to its own particularities, its own way of being in the world
• Analogical way rests on profound similarity beneath surface of dissimilarities
• We can’t wiggle our way back into this mentality
 Yet we do not need to return to sacramental universe; and significance of images does not rest on symbolic participation (that is her claim!)
 If we hear THIS IS MY BODY
• The symbolic statement of it is straightforward, needs that sacramental world view (CATHOLIC)
• The METAPHORIC STATEMENT of it contains the whisper “it is and it is not” (PROTESTANT)
• Caricatures of Prot/Cath: The Protestant sensibility tends to see dissimilarity , distinction, tension and hence to be skeptical and secular, stressing the transcendence of Cod and the finitude of creation. The Catholic sensibility tends to see similarity, connection, harmony and, hence, to be believing and religious, stressing the continuity between God and creation.
• Symbolic is untenable, Metaphoric slips so so easily into the negative and agnostic: it sees connections but they are of a tensive, discontinuous, and surprising nature.
• it is the contention of this essay, however, that the Protestant sensibility is more characteristic of our time and is the place from which many of us MUST START. What we seek, then, is a form of theology, a form for our talk about God both at the primary religious level of images and the secondary theological level of concepts, which takes the Protestant sensibility seriously.
• Metaphorical theology
 It is indigenous to Christianity: parables
 METAPHOR DEF: a metaphor is seeing one thing as something else, pretending "this” is “that” because we do not know how to think or talk about “this,” so we use “that” as a way of saying something about it. Thinking metaphorically means spotting a thread of similarity between two dissimilar objects, events, or whatever, one of which is better known than the other, and using the better-known one as a way of speaking about the lesser known
• Metaphor IS ordinary language–not poetic or esoteric or ornamental devices imposed onto ordinary language. It is indirect in a different way that poetry is. sometimes conceptual or abstract, but all about the similar in the sea of the dissimilars.
• Metaphorical religious language is in continuity with the way we ordinarily think.
• In metaphorical language we always make judgements.
• Symbolic statements, on the other hand, are not so much a way of knowing and speaking as they are sedimentation and solidification of metaphor. For in symbolical or sacramental thought, one does not think of “this” as “that,” but “this" as a part of “that.” The tension of metaphor is absorbed by the harmony of symbol
• Metaphor finds the vein of similarity in the midst of dissimilars, while symbol rests on similarity already present and assumed. ****
o But the difference is even more marked: metaphor not only lives in the region of dissimilarity, but also in the region of the unconventional and surprising. Humor and grotesque are metaphorical.
• SUMMARY: The characteristics of metaphorical thinking we have suggested—ordinariness, incongruity, indirection, skepticism, judgment, unconventionality, surprise, and transformation or revolution
• [Parables are all of these: metaphorical theology starts with the parables of Jesus and with Jesus as a parable of God
• the parables as metaphors and the life of Jesus as a metaphor of God provide characteristics for theology: a theology guided by them is open-ended, tentative, indirect, tensive, iconoclastic, transformative.
• It is negative but not via negativa: it not only says “is not” but “is,” not only NO BUT YES.
• METAPHORIC THEOLOGY CANNOT STOP WITH METAPHORS: they fund theology. They must deal with the entire gamut of religious/theological language
• Moving beyond metaphors is necessary both to avoid literalizing them and to attempt significant interpretations of them for our time!!
 Parables
• Relational; Jesus after all was a person relating to other persons in loving service and transforming power
o Yet not relational in traditional way: this is no maleGod but a person: imago dei, unpatriarchal.
• Cry out for interpretation (not for one interpretation though!: they ask: what do I mean?)
 The Model
• DEF: This is a dominant metaphor, a metaphor with staying power
• They are step along route from metaphoric to conceptual language
• similar to metaphors in that they are images which retain the tension of the “is and is not” and, like religious and poetic metaphors, they have emotional appeal insofar as they suggest ways of understanding our being in the world.
• They give us something to think about when we do not know what to think, a way of talking when we do not know how to talk. But the) are also dangerous, for they exclude other ways of thinking and talking, and in so doing they can easily become literalized, that is, identified as the one and only way of understanding a subject.
 Concepts (and theories)
• Concept DEF: an abstract notion
• Theory DEF: organizes ideas into an explanatory concept
• Concepts, unlike metaphors, do not create new meaning, but rely on conventional, accepted meanings. Theories, unlike models, do not systematize one area in terms of another, but organize concepts into a whole.
• [All these DEFs are only minimally helpful “For they are too neat and compartmentalized for a metaphorical theology”]
• Concepts and theories are metaphoric in that they are constructions and they are indirect.
• Rarely do these two expose their metaphoric roots though!
 Root-metaphor
• DEF: the most basic assumption about the nature of the world or experience that we can make when we try to give a description of it. Each root-metaphor is a way of seeing “all that is” through a particular key concept. It is also thinking by models and, as is evident, even these root-metaphors are still metaphor
• This book will focus on models bc they, as mediators between metaphors and concepts, partake of the characteristics of each
• Tasks of metaphorical theology
 to understand the centrality of models in religion and the particular models in the Christian tradition;
 to criticize literalized, exclusive mo

[Bea · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a revelation for me. after two years of biblical study and theology, this book opened a new way of thinking for me.
by discussing the way that even language is a metaphor for the thing it names or describes, mcfague develops the understanding of the way all our 'god' language must necessarily be metaphorical.

from there i found a new freedom in thinking about and experiencing god in all aspects. i must begin with an inner idea and from there i work to find ways to speak of what is always ineffable.

what this means is that so much of what is the language of faith is best approached as a cultural construct, working to name and describe things which are beyond words. for me this has become foundational to how i think of and try to talk of my own religious life. and it has made the task of communicating to others both more excitng and more challenging.

the hardest thing for me now is to work with trying to find the meaning behind the metaphors which others use, often without realising. that way i can begin to share something of their experience of the spiritual.

this remains one of my favourite theological texts.

[Steve Irby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished "Metaphorical Theology: models of God in religious language," by Sallie Mcfague.

This was my first feminist theology (not to mention only the second female writer I believe I have ever read; the other was Rand: who is John Galt?) I have read. The important thing about this book is that though she has an axe to grind--that we can abstain from only using Male language in reference to God--she lays out the framework for metaphor first and as primary. Or to say it otherwise, she let's the method of using metaphor pay it's own rent before she climbs on her soapbox. Once there she makes her case for incorporating feminine language of God. Finally she lands on "friend" not just in practice but also as a partial model for the atonement. This was a good work on metaphor though John Sanders more recent "Theology in the Flesh" was a better ride for metaphor and cognitive linguistics.

[Sanjuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book. I've read a lot on metaphor theory, and especially its uses in religious texts, and McFague's book is one of the more compelling. I read the book in a couple of sittings, took lots of notes. The most convincing aspect is the insistence that metaphorical language is necessary when speaking about God if one wants to avoid idolatry. The greatest inadequacy of the book is towards the end, when McFague treats God-as-father language. She is so enamored with the problems caused with the use of this language that she never gets around to having a fruitful discussion on the redemptive ways this language functions - these redemptive notes can be found in more recent treatments on that subject by Marianne Meye Thompson and Amy Peeler.

[Trinki Brueckner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This superb book was written by an early feminist theologian. McFague writes that the metaphor of God as father has become an idol and is irrelevant to many who are not white males. She states that Jesus taught in parables which are metaphors, and that Jesus himself is a parable (metaphor). Many metaphors are needed to describe the many ways that people relate to and experience God: mother and natural entities (the sea, fire) for example. She examines most closely the advantages and disadvantages of referring to God as friend. I loved this book.

[Chris Holmes]

I had been wanting to read this for quite some time. Finally carved out some time to do so. Really important book in terms of the language we use to describe God. Captivated by the image of God as friend, which she discusses in the final chapter.

[Ronald Tardelly,s.x.]

Sallie, a theologian feminist speaks about somes fondaments metapohoric in religious thinking. Dia banyak membantu juga dengan kritis memeriksa bahasa-bahasa teologis yang bias gender dalam kristianisme.

[Kessia Reyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

It hurt my mind. In a good way.

[Nathan Smith]

looking forward to this one...