228 religious revolution nowgroundlessness, insatiability, and susceptibility to belittlement. Th ere is
an asymmetry or instability in the conception of both God and the self.
Th e theomorphic conception of the self must be true in more than an
allegorical or meta phorical sense for the message of the salvation reli-
gion to mean anything close to what its scriptural texts represent it to
mean and to what it has in fact been understood to mean in the history
of the communities of faith that adhere to it. However, the man- modeled
conception of God can be true only in a relative sense, which we at-
tempt to leave safely vague by recourse to the idea of analogy. Th e prob-
lem is that the theomorphic conception of the person depends on the
anthropomorphic idea of God: the incoherence of the latter threatens
to contaminate the former.
Th e anthropomorphic conception of God appears to place concep-
tual incoherence (God as both person and not person) in the ser vice of
idolatry: the idolatry of a version of ourselves, hypostasized as a sepa-
rate being who fashioned the world to make us and who has already
rescued us from death and groundlessness. Feuerbach’s criticism of
Christianity as the religion of our alienated powers and essence works
out the implications of an idea of God expressing this paradoxical
amalgam of self- deifi cation and self- abasement on the part of the
believer.
Th e third option is to describe God, by double negation, as non-
being and non- person. Such has generally been the position preferred
by the gnostics and mystics, ancient and modern, of the three religions
of salvation: the via negativa of a theology resistant to both anthropo-
morphism and ontology in its approach to God. Th is third option,
however, represents a confession of the impotence of reason. It amounts
less to another conception of God than to a statement of our inability to
form such a conception; the incoherence of the other two ideas of God
gives way to the emptiness of this one.
Th e double denial— of God as being and of God as person— can nev-
ertheless produce a positive result. It is, however, a result bordering on
heresy. Notwithstanding the logic of the double negation, negative the-
ology is not in fact neutral between the two ideas that it rejects. Th e
denial of the personality of God has defi nitive consequences. Th e de-
nial of the ontological status of God has only equivocal implications. If
God cannot be a person, even in the relative sense allowed by analogy,