Abstract

For more than thirty years, the question of how sentences about God manage to refer has been in the background and often in the foreground of discussions of religious language and metaphysics. In some cases philosophers of religion and theologians have spoken vaguely about or given up all together claims to depict reality in religious discourse. Janet Martin Soskice challenges these views on the grounds that they are rooted in a bankrupt form of empiricism and that they fail to be consistent with the aim of traditional Christian faith to refer to God as a reality. She argues for the necessity of metaphorical language in speaking of God and for a theory of metaphor consistent with critical realism in theology.