First Meditation: Who Is God? 81
pure inscrutable power. But, alas, honesty is not the same
thing as cogency. The epistemological cost of this candor is
enormous - to the point, in fact, of a total impoverishment-
because Reformed theology is still dogmatically obliged to as-
cribe to God all those predicates (except "love," apparently)
that scripture supplies, and so must call God "good," "just,"
"merciful," "wise," and "truthful." But, transparently, all these
terms have been rendered equivocal by the doctrines that sur-
round them, and this equivocity is necessarily contagious; it
reduces all theological language to vacuity, for none of it can
now be trusted. The system, in the end, is one devoid of logi-
cal or semantic content: it means nothing, it can be neither
believed nor doubted, it is just a formal arrangement of intrin-
sically empty signifiers, no more true or false than any other
purely abstract pattern. And obviously no refuge is offered by
the stern teaching of the human intellect's "total depravity," as
that merely reiterates the problem of equivocity, albeit with a
decorous dressing of ceremonious cringing. If faith is really
so devoid of evident rationality, then it is not even faith, for it
possesses no intelligible content. Thus, even if the traditional
Calvinist were right, he would be wrong for believing he was
right. In the words of John Stuart Mill (in his An Examina-
tion of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy), "To say that God's
goodness may be different in kind from man's goodness, what
is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God
may possibly not be good?" Again, however, it is not only Re-
formed theology that suffers from this contagion of equivocity;
it infects every theology that includes the notion of an eternal
hell- which is to say, just about the whole Christian tradition.
This is not a complicated issue, it seems to me: The eter-
nal perdition - the eternal suffering- of any soul would be an
abominable tragedy, and therefore a profound natural evil; this